– Kevin Epstein, Vice President of Marketing for Drobo (www.drobo.com), says:
Describe a Drobo.
Drobo is Big Storage in a Small Box. Physically, a single Drobo looks like a black rectangular box with LED capacity and disk status indicators on the front, with 4 to 12 disk-drive bays, and various connectivity options (iSCSI, Ethernet / File Sharing, USB 3.0, eSATA, Firewire).
The Drobo allows any combination of types, sizes, or speeds of hard drives to be placed in some or all of the drive bays, at any time (hot-swapping is possible), where they form a larger logical redundant whole, available to various applications.
The result: an unprecedented combination of sophisticated data protection and management features, affordable capacity, and ease-of-use.
Why is Drobo storage for Business useful in today’s SMB server closets?
Drobo provides easy to deploy, affordable storage capacity that is protected against failures (redundant disks), eases capacity planning (thin provisioning), and optimizes application performance (data-aware tiering).
The world is increasingly reliant on digital data and has a constant need for more, easily implemented, reliable storage capacity – but at the same time, most SMBs lack the ability to spend tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars and days to weeks of implementation effort creating such.
For these and others (25% of the Fortune 500), Drobo is the answer: sophisticated and advanced storage capabilities in an easy, affordable, safe & expandable package.
The benefit for data center/IT managers.
Drobos’ enable more affordable, rapid deployments of server virtualization (VMware, Citrix), email (MS Exchange), and file sharing / offsite backup (built-in synchronization).
Coupled with Drobo support for thin provisioning (assign applications more storage than is currently physically present; add drives one by one as needed) and support for Data-Aware Tiering (application data is automatically placed in different storage performance areas based on the application’s need), Drobo solves the SMB storage capacity planning and application optimization challenges.
Ask yourself whether there’s a comparable solution for your storage that matches Drobo’s combination of:
- Ease-of-use (5 clicks to deploy)
- Affordability (support for VMware, Exchange, and Backup comparable to $30k+ “big storage” boxes from legacy storage vendors)
- Sophistication (BeyondRAID data protection, capacity adjustment, thin provisioning and deprovisioning, data-aware tiering)
Over 150,000 customers in the last three years, including government, education, SMB and individuals, have chosen Drobo to meet their storage needs, due to our unique combination of affordability, eas of use, and sophistication – “Big Storage in a Small Box”.
