BeyondRAID Technology

A Drobo B1200i iSCSI array can hold up to 36TB 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 and instantaneous and access to data is always maintained, all while protecting you from two simultaneous drive failures.

Automated Data-Aware Tiering

The Drobo B1200i moves beyond the days of manually tuning an array for applications that have different storage requirements. Automated Data-Aware Tiering leverages high-capacity hard disk drives (HDDs) paired with high-performance solid state drives (SSDs) to deliver application-optimized storage that requires no manual tuning.

Note: Automated Data-Aware Tiering will support SSDs in a software update targeted for Q1 2012.

Smart Volumes with Thin Provisioning

Create new volumes up to 16TB in seconds and manage them over time with ease. The innovative and timesaving Smart Volume management technology with Thin Provisioning integrated into the Drobo B1200i allows volumes to pull storage from the common pool of disks rather than a specific physical disk allocation. The labor of resizing and migrating volumes is replaced with the simplicity of intelligent engineering.

Designed for IT Environments

The B1200i is the first Drobo 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. You can source field replaceable units in advance in case of a single hardware component failure, to ensure high uptimes. This delivers the higher level of availability demanded by virtualized IT environments.

Optimizing Business Applications

Similar to business applications, Drobo is ideal for building your first server virtualization cluster, highly available email server, or scalable backup server. Drobo technology has been certified for VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, Symantec Backup Exec, and Veeam Backup environments. Learn more about Drobo business solutions on the Drobo Broadcast Network.

About iSCSI SANs

Unfamiliar with iSCSI? It’s a high-performance protocol that’s become extremely popular storage networking technology in IT environments, but it can often be complex to manage. Drobo B800i changes that by introducing zero-click iSCSI configuration for both Windows and Mac OS X servers.

With an iSCSI SAN, centralized storage is provided to each server over a high-speed Ethernet network and storage can be allocated or expanded instantaneously. Also, no single server can tie up free space and there are fewer storage devices to maintain.