Drobo Unveils 8-Bay iSCSI SAN Array With Data-Aware Tiering

Drobo, Inc. launched the B810i, an 8-bay iSCSI SAN array with data-aware tiering.

Built on BeyondRAID technology, coupled with hybrid storage and data-aware tiering, the B810i is five times faster than its predecessor and delivers a level of automation and technical sophistication usually reserved for more expensive enterprise solutions. This product stands apart from other storage array in its class because of its advanced functionality, ease of use and price point.

“The B810i is a great extension to our product line,” said Mihir Shah, CEO, Drobo. “We are excited to offer a high performance and cost effective storage solution to small and medium sized businesses as their storage needs continue to grow. Drobo continues to innovate and create products that are the easiest to use and offer maximum investment protection for our customers. We want our customers to focus on their business, while the B810i manages applications such as file services, data protection, email and server virtualization.“

B810i rear

The B810i is optimized for SMBs that don’t have dedicated IT support. It can be used to simplify and consolidate both physical and virtual storage in a single array with an ‘on-demand’ ability to scale both capacity and performance. The B810i allows for effective work collaboration, storage of creative workflows, and a trustworthy, easy-to-use backup solution.

Hybrid storage and data aware tiering
The ability of the B810i to automatically recognize and move frequently accessed transactional data from seldomly used data enables businesses to consolidate storage resources while optimizing performance for all clients and their applications. This also makes transactional data access, such as database or email servers, much faster.

Company’s hybrid storage is a unique blend of high-capacity HDD drives and high performance SSDs working together simultaneously for both read and write acceleration. This happens automatically without requiring user setup or configuration as soon as SSD drives are added to the appliances.

The B810i intelligently differentiates between streaming and transactional data to enable instantaneous and intelligent data tiering that increases overall performance by directing transactional data to the SSDs. Transactional data is reading and writing of small pieces of data; these access patterns are typical of email servers, databases, and office workers editing files such as spreadsheets or presentations. As data access patterns change, Drobo automatically reallocates the data between the HDDs and SSDs to maximize performance. The result is fast redundant storage that requires no manual tuning, giving the user piece of mind that their data will always be accessible and safe.

Sophisticated, trustworthy and simple data protection
The B810i is built with firm’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 appliance will automatically return the data to a protected state without intervention or disruption, making it self-healing with its virtual hot-spares.

“The B810i takes advantage of our unique approach to transactional data by placing that data at rest in the SSD transactional tier instead of just staging it there,” said Rod Harrison, CTO, Drobo. “Combined with the concurrent use of the same SSDs for Hot Data Caching gives the B810i a 5x performance increase over the B800i without the penalties of moving data a second time.“

The B810i is available, at an MSRP of $1,699 through the company’s webstore and selected channel partners.

For a limited time, the B810i includes two free 2TB HDDs when purchased through the US firm’ store. Offer ends April 30, 2016.