Why choose EXcaliberPC.com for your storage needs?
● Manufacturer Trusted Partner - Official Thecus Authorized System Partner since 2004.
● Genuine Products - EXcaliberPC.com acquires products from manufactures & authorized channels ONLY.
● Stability - EXcaliberPC.com invests in long term customer relationships and has been serving customer storage needs since 2003.
● Production Ready - Tested and burnt in systems ready to use right out of the box with latest stable firmware (System units w/ HDD preinstalled only).
● Full Manufacturer Warranty - EXcaliberPC.com ensures guidelines are followed to ensure customers get 100% of their full manufacture warranty.
● Genuine Care - EXcaliberPC.com support answers every email sent within same business day and we are always ready to step up and help you.
● Competitive Pricing and Abundance of Choice - We offer the best value and have modest complete array of pre-configured system for customers to choose from.
- Up to 8 disks of instant expansion
- 3.5" SATA 1 / SATA II drives
- Single, fixed power supply (Ensuring all drives are used as all times)
- BeyondRAID Technology
- Optimizing Business Applications
- iSCSI SANs for business-critical
Drobo SAN Storage for Business
Drobo delivers "big storage in a small box" to create the best storage experience ever for small and medium sized businesses and departments at larger enterprises. Built on proven BeyondRAID technology, Drobo redefines IT economics by delivering award-winning iSCSI SAN storage and advanced capabilities usually reserved for more expensive enterprise solutions.
Drobo iSCSI SAN storage is designed to provide reliable and high performance storage to servers running business-critical applications like data protection, email, and server virtualization. It connects seamlessly to your existing TCP/IP network and utilizes the industry-standard iSCSI protocol to provide simple, consolidated storage for your servers.
With two iSCSI models available, there's a Drobo that's right for your application. The 8-bay cost-effective B800i model is ideal for data protection or for small business building a SAN for the first time. The powerful 12-bay B1200i model adds Data-Aware Tiering and redundant, hot-swappable components to ensure maximum performance and high-availability of business applications.
Drobo Storage for Business Family Comparison
BeyondRAID Technology
An iSCSI Drobo can hold up to 24 TB (B1200i 12-Bay) of raw storage and beyond. To add capacity, simply insert a new hard drive or replace your smallest drive with a larger one, even when all drive bays are full. Unlike traditional RAID systems, the BeyondRAID technology in Drobo enables you to leverage different drive capacities, allowing for continuous expansion as larger drives become available. With Drobo, expansion is automatic, instantaneous, and access to data is always maintained.
Drobo can protect from single or dual drive failures and has a virtual hot spare capability - ensuring all drives are used at all times.
Optimizing Business Applications
Like with business applications, Drobo is ideal for building your first server virtualization cluster and had been certified for VMware vSphere and Citrix Xen Server environments.
Drobo is also a cost-effective way to provide reliable storage for your backup server and has been certified for use with Symantec Backup Exec.
About iSCSI SANs
iSCSI can be used to connect storage directly to servers using a high-speed connection, or it can be used to create a Storage Area Network (SAN) with to 2, 5, or 10 plus servers.
With an iSCSI SAN, centralized storage is provided to each server over a high-speed network and storage can be allocated or expanded instantaneously. Also, any single server does not tie up free space and there are fewer storage devices to maintain.
Figure 1 shows a dedicated iSCSI SAN for business-critical applications and server virtualization, which provides high performance, reliability, and security. Volumes created on a Drobo are assigned to a server, resulting in the server thinking it has locally attached storage.
Drobo Care Service and Support Program
The Drobo Care service and support program extends your peace of mind beyond the standard warranty terms for 3 years and beyond. With DroboCare, we're always here to answer your call and if something happens to go wrong, we'll send you a replacement Drobo right away.
Features
Design
All Drobos have carrier-less drive insertion. This means there are no special parts or screws that have to be added to the drives before they are inserted. It's like inserting a cassette tape into a video recorder.
The modular design of the B1200i model delivers enhanced availability and serviceability for environments hosting business-critical applications. This allows fans and power supplies to be replaced without taking the Drobo down.
While both Drobo SAN storage models can be rack mounted, the Drobo model B800i is compact and quiet, making it ideal for workgroup environments that need storage located in an office or on a desk.
Even the faceplate is magnetic, with the manual on the back. Primary management is by using drive status lights and visual capacity gauge.
And, all Drobos look good too!
What's BeyondRAID? Storage without limitations
BeyondRAID technology, built into every Drobo, delivers all of the benefits of traditional RAID, while providing much more and leaving many of the limitations behind. This next-generation of redundant storage technology brings together enhanced protection, reliability, expandability, and ease-of-use.
Drobos, based on BeyondRAID, interact with computing systems in the same manner as storage arrays using traditional RAID, so installing a Drobo allows you to maintain your current operating system and file system. This eliminates the challenges and costs when moving to a new storage technology.
- Thin Provisioning as a fundamental capability allows for infinite capacity expansion by just replacing a drive with a larger one
- Instant Expansion occurs when a new, or larger, drive is inserted without any disruption in service
- Drobo's volumes are Smart Volumes, pulling needed storage from a common pool and then returning deleted blocks back to the common pool
- Mixed Drive Utilization allows you to insert any drive, of any size, or any type, and Drobo will optimally use it - check out our interactive Capacity Calculator
- Automatic Protection Levels ensures the best algorithm is used to protect from drive failure depending on the number of drives that are inserted without any user configuration
- Dual Disk Redundancy enhances BeyondRAID protection by guarding from multiple drive failures
- Virtual Hot Spare utilizes all drives at all time - no drives sitting idle waiting for one to fail
- Drobos are Data Aware, intelligently handling data for added resiliency, performance, and management
- Drive Re-ordering allows Drobo disk packs to be moved to another Drobo, and even re-ordered, while still functioning - try that with RAID
BeyondRAID technology, built into every Drobo, delivers all of the benefits of traditional RAID, while providing much more and leaving many of the limitations behind. This next-generation of redundant storage technology brings together enhanced protection, reliability, expandability, and ease-of-use.
Drobos, based on BeyondRAID, interact with computing systems in the same manner as storage arrays using traditional RAID, so installing a Drobo allows you to maintain your current operating system and file system. This eliminates the challenges and costs when moving to a new storage technology.
Problems with Traditional RAID
RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) was developed in the 1980s to pool disk drives for increased capacity and reliability for data storage. Since then, RAID has been a huge success, preventing single disk drive failures from causing data loss, and has been used in almost every enterprise data center.
Unfortunately, the complexity of RAID has made it challenging for small businesses and consumers to effectively use the technology. RAID has a high learning curve with many options. There's RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, and 60 along with unfamiliar terminology like striping, mirroring, and parity.
Moving Beyond RAID
Drobo's BeyondRAID technology solves these fundamental issues with traditional RAID while delivering much more. Built on an advanced virtualization platform, BeyondRAID chooses the correct protection algorithm based on data availability needs at any given moment.Since the technology works at the block level, it can write blocks of data that alternate between data protection approaches.
If you need to add storage capacity to a Drobo, simply insert additional disk drives or replace the smallest disks with larger ones - no need to change RAID levels, purchase a new storage array or go through the complex administration of pooling RAID groups. The BeyondRAID feature even allows IT managers to switch from single to dual disk redundancy with a single click, thereby ensuring enterprise-level dual parity data protection if required. If a drive happens to fail, Drobo will automatically re-layout the data to return to a protected state without any user interaction.
BeyondRAID vs. Traditional RAID
Data-Aware Tiering
Data-Aware Tiering SANs allow businesses to consolidate storage resources and share that storage across all connected servers and their applications. The reality is that different applications have different workloads. Transactional databases require different storage behavior than streaming media applications. Traditional storage has treated all workloads as equal, not optimizing for any of them.
The intellegence built into the Drobo model B1200i allows it to do Data-Aware Tiering, optimizing data layout and drive useage for "hot" requests. Providing faster access to frequently requested information will improve performance of Exchange, SQLServer, and other transactional applications that read and write lots of small data chunks.
Drobo Dashboard Management
Drobo Dashboard. Look at all of your Drobos, at the same time.
The primary user interface is on the front of every Drobo. A status light for every drive bay and a capacity gauge to see how much data is currently stored. After the Drobo is set up, no other management tool is needed.
If you have multiple Drobos, wouldn't it be nice to see all of them from a single window? That's what Drobo Dashboard does.
A Single Pane of Glass
Drobo Dashboard, running on Windows or Mac OS X, is a single window to get status on and manage all of your Drobos. Here is a tour through Drobo Dashboard:
Main View
When Drobo Dashboard is launched, it shows all Drobos connected to your computer and scans the network for file sharing and iSCSI Drobos. The front panel of a Drobo is the primary user interface and Drobo Dashboard lets you see in the front panel all your Drobos from a remote location.
Capacity and Tools
An easy-to-read, but detailed, capacity chart is available, with a pull-down menu to access common Drobo tools like naming the device, updating firmware, and shutting down.
A view is also a click away to see exactly how the raw disk capacity is being used and how much space is available for use.
Status
Detailed status can be obtained about the Drobo and the drives contained in it. Since Drobo supports mixed drive types and sizes, it helps to know which drives are in which bays. When Drobo is running low on space, simply remove the smallest drive and replace it with a larger one.
Settings
All of the settings windows are simple and easy to use - as expected with a Drobo.
Management Options to Fit Your Needs
Management options like email notification and SNMP are easily configured right in Drobo Dashboard. This provides IT administrators with the tools necessary to monitor Drobos without any day-to-day effort.
