Personal Computing: DroboPro – Drobo Grows Up

There’s a new Drobo out!  

The Drobo range has been expanded with the release of the DroboPro, an 8-drive big brother to the Drobo “classic”.  The new model is being touted as a “business class storage array” and looks very interesting for the basic price tag of $1299 without drives.

Specifications

So, the DroboPro has capacity for up to eight 3.5″ SATA drives.  With spinning rust boxes now at 2TB a drive, that’s up to 16TB of raw capacity.  Clearly that amount of storage is probably way too much for a single PC and that’s where the “business” part comes in.  The DroboPro supports iSCSI (through a single gigabit connection), raising the stakes by moving it into the multiple server league.  It can also be rack mounted, although that does look a little weird.  

There are limitations however as the DroboPro supports a maximum of 16x 16TB drives – but they are thin provisioned.

Wish List

My comments are only based on what I’ve read on the Drobo website, however I am an existing Drobo owner.  I have both the Drobo “classic” and the DroboShelf (oops, sorry DroboShare).  The classic is great, just running and running, however the DroboShare was a disappointment and I don’t use it for anything other than a rest for the Drobo.  I’d like to evaluate the ‘Pro, however in the meantime, here’s my wish list of features:

• DroboMini – please do a Drobo which accepts 2.5″ drives – preferably both SATA and SAS.
• Partitioning – with multiple drive type support, provide multiple pools – tiering in a box.
• Multiple Ethernet – more than one Ethernet port would be good!
• Snapshots – point in time copies of LUNs
• Replication – OK perhaps I’m going a bit far…

I think it’s worth recapping what the DroboPro offers; secure scalable storage – iSCSI out of the box – thin provisioning. Bring it on!

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