Data Robotics' Drobo storage boxes have become quite well known in the consumer space, but the company also has a presence in the business market. Now that presence is getting a little larger with the introduction of three new storage solutions specifically for the SMB market.
The announcement covers the new eight-bay B800 FS as well as two iSCSI-enabled SAN solutions - the 12-bay B1200i and the eight-bay B800i. All three support 3.5in drives up to 2TB over SATA 3Gbps and can each be mounted into a 3U space in a standard 19in server rack - although they're just as comfortable sitting on a desk.
But what'll probably appeal to business customers the most is the inclusion of the Drobo BeyondRAID technology, which combines data-redundancy with flexibility and expandability options not available to normal RAID arrays.
This includes the ability to enable dual disk-redundancy and combine drives of different sizes seamlessly in the array at any time. Of course, all of this is invisible to the OS, so BeyondRAID is compatible with pretty much any OS - it's even been certified for VMWare, Citrix, Microsoft Exchange and Symantec backup.
For the iSCSI-ready SAN boxes, the manufacturer has also equipped them with 'zero-click' connections for Windows and OSX, making set up a completely automatic affair.
The eight-bay Drobo boxes should be available immediately starting at £1,409. The 12-bay SAN won't be available until sometime in quarter two, when it'll set you back around $8,500 (£6,600 inc VAT).
