GoodMakers Film Winner of “100 Drobos’ Contest”

Drobo
Inc. makers of data storage products for businesses
and professionals, revealed how GoodMakers
Film Foundation,
a winner of last year’s ‘100 Drobos’ contest, is using its Drobos.

GoodMakers is devoted to increasing
charity impact through short documentary films that help encourage
donations and provide exposure to worthwhile causes in Africa and the
U.S. The non-profit organization deploys Drobo external HDDs in its
U.S. studio. At no cost to the groups they work with, the studio
produces videos that can increase donations often to 10 times the
cost of producing the video.

GoodMakers also donated many Drobo
devices to the charities it supports to help enable record keeping
and protection. 

"We could not fulfill our
mission without the support and generosity from Drobo," said
Cris Blyth, founder of GoodMakers Films. "We work with
multiple charities throughout the world and no organization we worked
with had data properly backed up. They simply could not afford to
spend a substantial amount of money on mass storage. Most struggled
with typical hard drives daisy chained together, which would quickly
fill up without an option to expand. Whether it was a doctor who
built a hospital in Tanzania that needed to back up patient records,
or orphanages struggling to build their computer labs; providing them
all with proper backup storage through Drobo has made a huge impact
on building their organizations and thus changing lives."

"Our goal for the ‘100 Drobos’
project was to support non-profit organizations that are making
original and compelling contributions to improve education, foster
the arts and change the world," said Tom Buiocchi, CEO of
Drobo. "GoodMakers Films fulfills that goal not only via the
films it makes to support charities, but also by donating 25 of the
Drobos it received to non-profits that would not otherwise be able to
store the films they create or bring them to a wider audience." 

In its Los Angeles studio, the company
uses a professional grade Drobo for its main storage pool and
archiving onto 16 drives. The organization was able to put old
drives into the Drobo unit to create a long-term archive system.
Another Drobo provides storage for an editing workstation; this unit
saved a film that was in the middle of production when the main OS X
boot drive failed.

"Our Drobos have been on night
and day since we installed them and I’ve been staggered by how robust
they are," said Blyth. "We were working on one of
our overseas projects and a storm rolled in. While the Drobo was busy
rebuilding data into a new drive, a lightning strike fried the UPS
the Drobo was connected to. When the storm cleared and we plugged in
the Drobo, we were expecting complete failure at worst or significant
data loss at best. We got neither: the Drobo booted back up and
continued to rebuild itself as if nothing had happened." 

The company has also shipped Drobos to
charities in the U.S. and Africa to help them produce films that
shine a light on their problems and needs:

• Kilimanjaro Film Institute:
  Institute trains Tanzanian youth for employment in the film industry

• Hot Sun Films: Award-wining
  company trains youth in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya

• FAME Africa: Non-profit
  organization provides medical care in rural Tanzania

• Rift Valley Children’s Village:
  Orphanage cares for children in Tanzania

• Non-profit documentary film ‘Happy’:
  Award-winning film goes around the world to explore what makes people
  happy