Drobo B1200i SSD Refreshed

Drobo, Inc. announced a refresh of its Drobo B1200i.

The B1200i SSD boosts performance by up to 300% over previous versions of the product, fueled by Drobo’s patent-pending automated data-tiering software and the hybrid use of solid state technology alongside traditional HDDs (SAS or SATA).

The B1200i SSD is ideal as primary storage for up to 250 users or as tier 2 storage and backup for departments in larger organizations. Existing B1200i customers can upgrade to the new performance and functionality via a free software download.

Affordability and Savings
The ability of the B1200i SSD to utilize a small number of SSDs alongside HDDs allows customers to enjoy the capacity of HDDes and the performance of SSD technology in a single storage system. Traditional storage systems configured with only one of the two can leave customers no option but to purchase multiple systems in order to meet their performance and capacity needs.

Customers who use Drobos in their business environments cite monetary savings of more than $12,000 and time savings of more than 200 hours per year, compared to industry alternatives such as Dell and HP, the two vendors customers often compare to Drobo.

A calculator comparing the estimated savings the B1200i SSD delivers at various performance and capacity needs versus industry alternatives is available.

"The Drobo B1200i SSD is simple, cost effective, and it works," said Dan Long, MIS director at Branch Manufacturing Company in Minnesota. "Drobo storage has all of the things I look for, and for a small business, it was easy to assemble and tune plus was a cost-effective solution for my environment."

Certified and Validated with VMware
and Other Solution Partners
The B1200i SSD has attained VMware Ready status with vSphere 5.0 certification. It fills the urgent need for higher performance to support VM density without sacrificing capacity and allows for users to add performance acceleration with the introduction of SSDs alongside HDDs. Detailed examples of B1200i SSD and VMware solution configurations can be found on the VMware Solution Exchange (VSX).

In addition to offering a range of primary storage solutions and use cases in Microsoft, VMware and Citrix environments, the B1200i SSD is also used in data protection solutions supporting Veeam, Acronis and Symantec backup and replication. Cloud backup with Amazon Web Services and others is also supported.

Details and how-to guides for all solutions

Independent Validation Cites Performance and ROI
The ESG (Enterprise Strategy Group) Lab performed hands-on evaluation and testing of the B1200i’s ability to support real-world SMB applications. The lab report noted that the new B1200i SSD "easily scales to over 1,200 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes, achieved exceptional response time results for mixed, real-world workloads, including email plus file serving plus OLTP, and proved strong streaming performance of nearly 300MB/s for data protection, video on demand, and other capacity-oriented applications."

Validation reports and reviews of the B1200i SSD

Enabled by Patent-Pending Technology
The underlying technologies that allow the enhanced B1200i SSD to reach these new levels of performance while retaining Drobo’s ease-of-use and affordability are patented and patent-pending technologies BeyondRAID with Automated Data-Aware Tiering.