Drobo B810n: 64TB NAS With Data Aware Tiering

Drobo, Inc. launched the B810n hybrid storage system.

Built on the company’s BeyondRAID technology, coupled with hybrid storage and innovative data aware tiering, the B810n is five-times faster than its predecessor and delivers a level of automation and technical sophistication usually reserved for more expensive enterprise solutions. The product is accessible to all, even the novice technology user, and is set apart from every other storage array at its price point with its ease of use and ability to protect storage in many ways.

“We believe there is a large portion of the market that really values simplicity,” said Mihir Shah, CEO, Drobo. “The founders of the company came from enterprise storage backgrounds and the problem they were trying to solve was, ‘How can we make this simple?‘, and we continue to develop products that are easy to use and have cutting edge technology.“

The B810n is for SMBss. It is used to simplify and consolidate both physical and virtual storage in a single array with ‘on-demand’ ability to scale both capacity and performance. This model allows for more effective work collaboration, the storage of creative workflows, the ability to set up a home entertainment system complete with personal media libraries and a easy-to-use backup system.

Drobo B810n rear

Hybrid storage and tiering
The B810n automates the tuning array for applications that have different storage access patterns. Its ability to automatically tier frequently used transactional data from stored data that’s seldom used enables businesses to consolidate storage resources and share that storage across all connected clients and their applications.

Company’s storage is a blend of high-capacity HDDs and high performance SSDs working together simultaneously for both read and write acceleration. This process happens automatically and transparently as soon as SSD drives are added to the Drobo. It intelligently differentiates between streaming and transactional data to enable instantaneous and intelligent data tiering that increase overall performance by directing transactional data to the SSDs. As data access patterns change, it automatically reallocates the data between the HDDs and SSDs to maximize performance. The result is fast redundant storage with a fast read cache for application-optimized solution that requires no manual tuning.

Simple data protection
The B810n boasts many features in data protection capabilities including a battery-backed cache and eUSB to protect data not yet written to disk from loss in the event of a sudden power failure.

The B810n features active background data scrubbing, periodically verifying all user data and metadata, and regularly searching and repairing corruption and inconsistencies. Its patent pending cache pre-heat provides recovery after power failure of cache metadata saved to disk.

The B810n is built with company’s BeyondRAID technology that protects users’ data without any intervention, even in the event of multiple drive failures. Users can switch from single to dual disk redundancy with a single click for enterprise dual parity data protection. Should a drive fail, the company will automatically return the data to a protected state without intervention or disruption, making it self-healing with its virtual hot-spares.

“The new Drobo B810n is different from every other network storage device in its price class because it protects your data in many more ways,” said Mark Fuccio, VP, products, Drobo, “Especially the battery-backed cache, which is not offered by other competitors and unique in using a blend of both SSDs and HDDs for more speed and storage capacity.“

The Drobo B810n is available at an MSRP of $1,599 through the company’s webstore and select channel partners.

It also comes with two free 240GB SSDs for purchases at company’s webstore (purchase by 12/31/15).