Drobo's hybrid storage array 'the largest, most powerful yet'

Currently used by thousands of businesses, the Drobo B1200i is an ideal way to simplify and consolidate both physical and virtual storage in a single array with “on-demand” ability to scale both capacity and performance. Major enhancements to the award-winning Drobo B1200i include:
· BeyondRAID performance boost up to 800%: High-workload tasks now run in parallel resulting in significantly improved performance
· Storage Pools grow 400% to 128TB: Larger storage pools can now take full advantage of high-capacity drives including Seagate® 6TB Enterprise Capacity SATA drives
· Volumes increase 400% to 64TB: Previously limited to 16TB, B1200i volumes can now go as large as 64TB on supported platforms (Windows, Mac and VMware)

· Smart Volumes™ management technology with Thin Provisioning: Allows the creation of up to 255 volumes per B1200i appliance. Drobo Smart Volumes pull storage from a common pool of disks rather than silos of physical disks

· Certified for VMware vSphere ESXi Hypervisor 6: This bare-metal hypervisor installs directly on a physical server while transparently using Drobo storage

“These enhancements easily make the B1200i the most expandable and highest performing Drobo in history. Our highly scalable, centralised storage system coupled with our innovative data tiering provides business users with impressive workload throughput for transaction-based applications,” said Tony Hampel, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Drobo. “When configured with a full complement of twelve 6TB SATA drives, users will have a high capacity, reliable, and intelligent hybrid storage array that seamlessly integrates into any organisation’s network and application infrastructure."

Drobo’s hybrid storage technology automates the provisioning, deployment and performance acceleration for a fast tier of solid-state drive (SSD) storage. Users can now take advantage of traditional hard disk drive (HDD) capacity plus SSD acceleration across all of their applications. This process happens automatically and transparently as soon as SSD drives are added to the deployed Drobo. Drobo intelligently differentiates between streaming and transactional data to enable instantaneous and intelligent data tiering that increase overall performance by directing transactional data to the SSDs. As data access patterns change, Drobo automatically reallocates the data between the HDDs and SSDs to maximise performance.

The B1200i represents many firsts for the Drobo product family: it is the first product with serviceable modular components. This hardware design provides a removable controller card, dual-redundant hot-swappable power supplies, and a hot-swappable cooling fan unit. Field replaceable units can be sourced for protection against a single hardware component failure to ensure maximum availability.

The Drobo B1200i is ideal for building a scalable backup server or server virtualisation cluster. It is certified for VMware vSphere, Symantec Backup Exec and Veeam Backup environments.

Like all Drobos, the B1200i is built with Drobo’s award-winning 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-level dual parity data protection. With BeyondRAID, the B1200i is self-healing and has virtual hot-spares. Should a drive fail, Drobo will automatically return the data to a protected state without intervention or disruption.