With a traditional RAID system, you’re stuck with one capacity of drive and it’s a pretty good idea to make sure they’re the same make and model as well. You also need to buy all the drives you want to use for the RAID up front, whether you’re using the capacity immediately or not.  With Drobo, however, those steps are not necessary. Using the Drobo Capacity Calculator, you can test all the configurations your Drobo can accommodate.

With Drobo, you can use any drive; it doesn’t matter what brand or capacity of the drives. You can have a Drobo 5D filled nice and neat with five matched 4TB drives, or a B1200i mismatched with all kinds of drives. You can even add new drives at any time. Drobo’s BeyondRAID™ technology creates a single virtualized shared storage pool for disk space. To test a virtual Drobo with the drive capacities, use the Capacity Calculator—which is easily accessible from any product page on the Drobo website.

While any pairing is possible, not all pairings are created equal. Let’s say you have a B1200i with 4 old 250GB drives and add a new 1TB drive; the 250GB drives will pair with the 1TB for redundancy, but the remaining space in the 1TB will be held for future expansion until another 1TB drive is added. To help you test this out and get the most out of your Drobo, we have the Capacity Calculator.

Unlike a traditional RAID that requires matched drives, Drobo lets you mix and match drives of any capacity. The Capacity Calculator helps you determine how particular pairings will affect your shared pool of storage. For more information on Drobo products, go to Drobo.com.  You can also watch our YouTube video about the Capacity Calculator.

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Drobo B800i

Our case studies are typically posted on Drobo Reviews, but we thought the readers of myDrobo would enjoy this too:

Innervel Solutions, Inc. is an IT services company that provides managed datacenter cloud hosting, communications solutions, and network and infrastructure consulting. They understand the intricacies of optimized storage, which is what helped guide their decision to purchase and install a Drobo B800i iSCSI SAN storage array to augment their existing infrastructure. While the staff had also considered using a Dell EqualLogic storage array, they chose the Drobo because it offered them a number of advantages, and saved them $5000 over the traditional storage solution as well.

The Drobo B800i is an 8-bay device capable of holding eight 3.5-inch SATA drives, for up to 28TB of raw data storage using today’s readily available 4TB drives. It provides the reliable, consolidated storage for servers that Innervel Solutions needs. They are using their Drobo device to store data from a file server, a Citrix XenServer, and as a physical server and workstation backup. The unit utilizes industry-standard iSCSI protocol, and is integrated into their existing TCP/IP network.

Among other aspects, the Drobo installed at Innervel Solutions allowed them to reduce storage management complexity, while at the same time expand a file server. In addition, it gave them the ability to implement tiered storage for virtualization.

The organization chose Drobo because it offered them the ability to expand their storage capabilities in the future as needed without overpaying for excess capacity now. They were extremely happy with the automatic RAID configuration capabilities of the unit, its efficiency, and its overall performance. According to Christopher Hays, one of the managing partners at Innervel Solutions, the Drobo gave them a larger terabyte pool for overall storage compared to competitors’ units.

To learn more about Drobo, request a Drobo for business live demo here and find us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+.

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myDrobo Top Blogs

Since 2007, Drobo’s mission has been to protect and serve the world’s data. Drobo is the safe and expandable data storage solution for your business or personal use. With DAS, NAS, and SAN offerings, Drobo plugs into your network or directly to Mac and Windows systems for data protection without the complexities of RAID, making it them most user friendly storage system.

Here are our top blog posts highlighting information that is helpful for all Drobo users:

Drobo Dashboard: Making Storage Management Simple

Drobo is designed from the ground up to be simple, hands-off storage. When it comes to configuration and management of the device, asking our customers to remember IP addresses, hostnames, or web URLs didn’t fit our objectives. While the light-based alerting system on the front panel allows for nearly all operations to be performed without the need to launch the Drobo Dashboard, there are some initial configuration tasks that must be performed with this tool… (read more)

Drobo: Increasing IOPS with an mSATA SSD

All prosumer Drobos now include an Accelerator Bay on the underside of the unit.  This feature allows for the use of an SSD to accelerate access to the most frequently accessed data, while still offering the expansive storage capacity of the traditional hard disks.  By combining disk technologies, the Drobo provides transactional performance for workspace storage that wouldn’t be possible in an all-HDD configuration.  The addition of an mSATA SSD increases the IOPS performance of the unit by three times, and significantly reduces access times when working from a network share with a very large number of files or directories on the Drobo 5N… (read more)

Drobo Data-Aware Tiering: Providing Accelerated Performance

Drobo recommends that when researching storage devices, the primary performance metric is throughput.  A quick scan of web reviews reveals that a majority of the focus is on how quickly the device can read or write large files. Think drag-and-drop. While this is a great metric if your device will primarily be used for data archive and backups, one must also consider IOPS performance as it relates to as workspace storage. IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per second) performance is measured by how quickly the device can work with small bits of data… (read more)

Data Storage Management: How Drobo Keeps Your Data Safer

When considering data storage management, the single most important factor is protection. Is your data safe?  The answer may not be an emphatic “yes” unless you are doing several things the right way, and using the right technologies.  No one technology protects you from everything, so answering yes happens when you have the combination of safe storage, reliable backup, offs store protection, and the ability to do all of these regularly and easily.  And affordably too, so you have complete protection… (read more)

Drobo Performance: When Your Drives Break

A hard drive failure is a question of when, not if.  You need to be prepared and protected to maintain a high level of Drobo performance. Every day in our live demos and on live chat we talk with individuals and business owners who are looking for more info on how they can be better protected.  Do you have data storage solutions that you are protecting?  According to a poll by SanDisk conducted by Harris Interactive: “Photos are so precious that 64 percent of U.S. adults would not consider destroying their family photo collection for any amount of money, not even for one million dollars.”  The folks that contact us for help understand the value of their data.  Do you feel your data is worth $1M, and are you doing everything to protect it from inevitable hard drive failure… (read more)

If you would you like to learn more about the experience of a Drobo, find us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+.

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Drobo 5N

All prosumer Drobos now include an Accelerator Bay on the underside of the unit.  This feature allows for the use of an SSD to accelerate access to the most frequently accessed data, while still offering the expansive storage capacity of the traditional hard disks.  By combining disk technologies, the Drobo provides transactional performance for workspace storage that wouldn’t be possible in an all-HDD configuration.  The addition of an mSATA SSD increases the IOPS performance of the unit by three times, and significantly reduces access times when working from a network share with a very large number of files or directories on the Drobo 5N.

When shopping for an mSATA card for your Drobo, the first step is consulting the SSD drive support page on the Drobo website.  This page includes an up-to-date list of supported and known unsupported drives.   As SSD technology continues to evolve, drives do not universally handle low-level disk operations in the same manner.  That said, the mSATA disks included on the drive compatibility page on the Drobo site have been tested by Drobo engineers to ensure they support all features required by the storage system.

Drobo customers demand expansive storage from their units and may be tempted to “go big” on the mSATA card.  While the Drobo currently supports up to a 640GB mSATA SSD, the recommended capacity is 64GB to 128GB.  This may seem small when compared with the HDDs in the unit, but it represents an expansive amount of cache storage.  As the Drobo works at the block level, only transactional portions of data are cached on the mSATA.  A 64GB mSATA card provides more than sufficient space for even the most demanding workloads.

If you’re considering adding an mSATA card to your all-SSD Drobo, there’s no need.  Your Drobo is already configured for maximum performance.

If you would you like to learn more about the experience of a Drobo, request a Drobo for business live demo here or find us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+.

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Drobo Dashboard

Drobo is designed from the ground up to be simple, hands-off storage. When it comes to configuration and management of the device, asking our customers to remember IP addresses, hostnames, or web URLs didn’t fit our objectives. While the light-based alerting system on the front panel allows for nearly all operations to be performed without the need to launch the Drobo Dashboard, there are some initial configuration tasks that must be performed with this tool.

After installing and launching the Drobo Dashboard on a Windows or OSX system, it will automatically detect all direct attached, network-attached, and iSCSI Drobos available to manage. All Drobos deployed in the environment can be managed and monitored from this single interface. For new deployments, the Dashboard is used to set IP address information, single- or dual-disk redundancy, and optional alerting via email. The Drobo automatically provides visual alerts, and pop-up alerts are sent to all hosts with the Drobo Dashboard installed.

Once configured, the Dashboard is used to create volumes and map them to the host. Since the Dashboard is the universal administration utility for all Drobos, volumes (or shares) are automatically formatted and mapped to the host computer in just a few clicks, no matter the interface type. There is no need to remember network share paths, configure iSCSI initiators, or use operating system partitioning, or formatting tools. On Windows or OSX systems, the Drobo Dashboard handles all of these tasks. For customers with more advanced IT knowledge or requirements, you still have the freedom to manually configure or map volumes.

If you would you like to learn more about the experience of a Drobo, request a Drobo for Business live demo here. We also have set Drobo solutions for your IT or data concerns that can be seen here. Find us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+

The post Drobo Dashboard: Making Storage Management Simple appeared first on Drobo Performance Blog.

Drobo

Drobo recommends that when researching storage devices, the primary performance metric is throughput.  A quick scan of web reviews reveals that a majority of the focus is on how quickly the device can read or write large files. Think drag-and-drop. While this is a great metric if your device will primarily be used for data archive and backups, one must also consider IOPS performance as it relates to as workspace storage. IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per second) performance is measured by how quickly the device can work with small bits of data.

The first sign that you might not have sufficient IOPS comes with slow response times within the application. If you’re waiting for the application to move between screens or files, the disk subsystem may be working at its maximum IOPS capacity. This not only slows the application, but also incurs significant latency.

While adding additional rotational drives to the RAID system will improve both throughput and IOPS performance, the benefits are limited by the low IOPS rating of the HDDs. Moving to an all SSD configuration vastly improves performance, but comes with a significant reduction in capacity.

All modern Drobos include support for automated Data-Aware Tiering. This technology was first introduced with the Drobo B1200i iSCSI business SAN, and is now available on all prosumer models. With the addition of an accelerator bay to the bottom of the device, it allows the Drobo to take advantage of the high IOPS performance of a SSD, while still offering the expansive storage space of a HDD. The Drobo uses the SSD in the accelerator bay to cache hot data, providing accelerated performance to the data you use most frequently. With the addition of the mSATA SSD, the IOPS performance of the Drobo is three times what is possible in a five drive all-HDD configuration.

If you would you like to learn more about the experience of a Drobo, request a Drobo for business live demo here. We also have set Drobo solutions for your IT or data concerns that can be seen here. Find us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+.

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How Drobo Keeps Your Data Safer

Data Storage Management

When considering data storage management, the single most important factor is protection. Is your data safe?  The answer may not be an emphatic “yes” unless you are doing several things the right way, and using the right technologies.  No one technology protects you from everything, so answering yes happens when you have the combination of safe storage, reliable backup, offs store protection, and the ability to do all of these regularly and easily.  And affordably too, so you have complete protection.

So, is your data safe from a hard drive failure?  How about unexpected power loss?  Corruption, user-error, accidental deletion?  All of these eventually happen, and using a Drobo the right way combined other technologies will keep you safe from them.  You may never have a catastrophe like a fire, flood, or theft, but you need to keep your data safe, whether on personal storage or IT storage.3-2-1 is possible without a Drobo as well, but Drobo keeps your data safer.

If you want the best data protection available, and it you want it to work automatically, without needing to be an expert in Network Data Storage or Data Storage Management, consider a Drobo.   Drobo has developed a number of technologies and solutions that work to keep your data and your business safe – without the need for that PhD in storage.  Some of these Drobo innovations and advancements include:

BeyondRAID

Sometimes, hard drives fail.  If you haven’t had one fail on you yet, count your blessings and bide your time.  Hard drives are amazing devices, but they are electro-mechanical machines that utilize high-precision physics.  They fail.  You want to make sure that your network data storage system is resilient to hard drive failures, and it this category there is nothing that compares to a Drobo.  Beyond the basic protection you expect from RAID (hence the name), Drobo systems continuously scrub data in the background to fix disk errors before they happen.  If there are too many errors, we proactively purge the drive and rebuilt using the available space on other drives.  To see more on how we do it, check out our whiteboard session.

Power Protection

Sometimes, the power goes out. Unexpected power outages are one of the most common causes of data loss. It is usually because you have not saved work, but when it comes to storage systems, they too need to “save” all data in-flight to disk before the lights go out. You should always have your IT storage connected to a UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) so brownouts and blackouts don’t affect you – but that’s like saying that you should floss every day.  And, when a UPS runs out of battery, you get a power outage.  Drobo protects your data with battery-backed cache so that in the event of spurious, unexpected, or catastrophic power failures – the Drobo will gracefully shut down so data is fully saved.  This is a feature that you just don’t see in the Drobo price category – but you might find it in enterprise IT storage systems that cost 5 to 25 times as much as a Drobo.

Offsite Backup and Replication

Sometimes, disasters happen at your home or office.  Drobo by itself does not protect against these calamities, but we can help you keep a copy of your data in a different location.   Drobo makes it easy by testing and integrating with the world’s best offsite backup and replication solutions, and providing how-to guides on putting the solutions together.  They include Hypervisor-based replication solutions like  VMware vSphere replication and Microsoft Hyper-V Replica, or backup applications like Veeam, Symantec, and Acronis, and even cloud solutions like Amazon Web Services (AWS) Storage Gateway or  Barracuda Copy for your IT storage.  Doing offsite backup and replication is often easier and lower cost than you might think, especially if you have not looked at the new options in a while.

RAID devices can keep your data safe, the way they have for 25+ years.  But little has changed since the invention or RAID in the 80s.  Drobo keeps your data safer with a newer, more advanced approach to data protection and data storage management.  And even better, it is usually lower cost to purchase, most often less expensive to expand, and always easier to use, so you spend time on other things.  Let the storage experts figure these things out and automate them for you!  That’s what we do.

If you would you like to learn more about the experience of a Drobo, request a Drobo for business live demo here. We also have set Drobo solutions for your IT or data concerns that can be seen here. Find us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+.

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Drobo Performance when your drives break

A hard drive failure is a question of when, not if.  You need to be prepared and protected to maintain a high level of Drobo performance. Every day in our live demos and on live chat we talk with individuals and business owners who are looking for more info on how they can be better protected.  Do you have data storage solutions that you are protecting?  According to a poll by SanDisk conducted by Harris Interactive: “Photos are so precious that 64 percent of U.S. adults would not consider destroying their family photo collection for any amount of money, not even for one million dollars.”  The folks that contact us for help understand the value of their data.  Do you feel your data is worth $1M, and are you doing everything to protect it from inevitable hard drive failure?

If you are prepared, you already have a redundant storage solution that protects your first copy from a hard drive failure.  And, you also have multiple backups, both local and off-site to protect from other calamities.  If you don’t, you are not alone, because most do not have the right data storage solution.  If you don’t, it means the data for your business is at risk or all of those priceless photos and memories can be lost.  We buy insurance to protect our cars, houses, and other property to the tune of thousands of dollars of cost each year, but for data storage much of it is on laptops, individual drives, and other single devices that are not protected.  Let’s talk about preparing for the path toward protection.

RAID was created in the mid-1980s to serve businesses.  No, not the bug spray you may first think of when you hear the word Raid; RAID stands for redundant array of independent devices.  RAID is almost as old as computers with hard drives.  Because it was made for techies, it requires a good deal of technical knowledge. You need to know what type of RAID you need, how to set up it up, how to manage a hot spare drive for redundancy, and so on and so forth.  RAID also forces identical hard drive models within the system. It protects against drive failures for sure, but RAID makes data storage solutions data storage tedious and potentially expensive if you need someone to manage it for you.

In short, Drobo BeyondRAID gives you the redundancy benefit of RAIDs without the downsides and some extras on the top.  Let’s say a drive failure happens.  You’re working on an important time-sensitive video project.  What do you do? Nothing! Drobo automatically recovers from this failure and gets you back to a protected state to manage the next time a drive might fail.  If you want to expand, pop the existing failed drive out and put in a new one.  No tricks, it’s that plain simple.  What if the drive you have available is a different size or from a different manufacturer?  With Drobo, it does not matter. Drobo is data storage solution without the worry or hassle.

Protecting your first copy is the first step and how to survive a drive failure, much better than restoring from backup.  Now, Step 2 still requires you to have a backup, to protect against file corruption on your first copy.  Step 3 is getting a backup off-site to protect from losing the entire location to a fire, theft, flood, etc.  More to discuss in another blog, and Drobo is great storage for storing on-site and off-site backups, too.  3-2-1—or three copies of data, on two types of media, one of them off-site—is the right protection to aim for.  I won’t ask if you are doing all of those, but I can say there are people in my family that are not doing it all (yet).

If you want the most powerful and user-friendly way to survive a disk failure, you owe it to yourself to put Drobo on your data storage short list. If you would you like to learn more about the experience of a Drobo, request a Drobo for business live demo here. Find us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+.

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Drobo 5N

We at Drobo have long been committed to the best storage experience ever, and we recognize that fulfilling this mission means having great support in addition to an innovative, intuitive product.  That’s one of the reasons we like to give you a number of ways to contact our trained Drobo support organization – for whatever you need.  Let’s quickly go over the options:

If your question or issue can’t be immediately resolved directly through the use of the Drobo dashboard and built-in Drobo messages, then you’ll want to contact the support team at Drobo.  They will begin working on the issue as soon as you call or submit your question via our online system, and they’ll make sure you are satisfied with the resolution when the process is complete.

Drobo Support Online

The most popular method for contacting Drobo Support is via an online request.  This method is convenient, quick, and will get you an answer within one business day, usually sooner.  Using this method expedites your request because you can submit it at any time, from anywhere.  Just submit an online request through the Drobo website, or use this link: https://support.datarobotics.com/app/ask

Drobo Support by Telephone

If your Drobo problems need to be addressed more immediately, you’ll want to contact Drobo Support by telephone.  The hours and regional Drobo support center phone numbers can be found on the Drobo website, or by following this link:  https://www.drobo.com/support/contact-support.php.  All support calls are handled by our trained staff in your region (for example our U.S. teams are in Omaha, Neb., and San Jose, Calif.), so you can be assured of the best accessibility and experience possible.

New – Live Chat

Oftentimes the support you need is not for a problem, but simply to get an answer to a question, or get advice on how to do something.  Part of the teams in Omaha and San Jose cover the Live Chat service on our website, and at most times throughout the day you can quickly get your answers and information live.  If your case is one best addressed with live support, our experts will help get you to the best person immediately.  You can find Live Chat on the Products and Solutions pages of the Drobowebsite, it pops-up  after about 10 seconds in the lower right of your browser window.

And finally, if contact Drobo through the Web, by phone, or via Twitter isn’t convenient or getting you what you need, you always have my email (tom@drobo.com) and phone number (408-276-8637).  No, I am not the world’s best tech support agent, but I do care that your questions are addressed in the best, most professional manner as soon as possible.  I won’t personally call everyone back, but I will make sure someone does!

Thanks – we realize that nobody wakes up every day “wanting” to call any customer support organization.  But when you have to, let’s try to make it flexible, professional, and easy so we can communicate when you have questions or simply need some advice.  That is why we are here; you have our word—and unwavering commitment—on that.

Tom

Learn more about Drobo at Drobo Business and Drobo Reviews. To learn more about the experience of a Drobo, request a Drobo for business live demo here. Find us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+.

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