Drobo have just announced their new Drobo B1200i 12-bay SAN, and it’s pricing starts at $10,000, so this is definitely for businesses!
Designed for applications like VMware, Microsoft Exchange, and backup for small and medium businesses, the Drobo B1200i offers another fundamental breakthrough with our new Automated Data-Aware Tiering technology. This innovation enables Drobo to automatically optimize performance over a mix of SAS and SSD drives within a single chassis. Performance levels adapt to your workloads in real time (no knobs, no tuning, no waiting), making it truly application-driven, not admin-driven!
The Drobo B1200i also includes:
- 12-bay SAN (iSCSI-attached) capabilities, with dual redundant power and other hardware redundancy.
- Patented BeyondRAID technology for the world’s most automated data protection.
- Drobo’s thin provisioning and thin reclamation capabilities to optimize your capacity and expandability needs.
All of these features, which you’d be hard-pressed to find in any one system at any price – starting at about $10,000. automated, application-driven, and affordable; perfect for small and medium businesses.
Drobo model B1200i Specifications
Connectivity
- 3 x 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet ports
- 1 x 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet port for out-of-band management
Capacity
- 12 drive bays
- 3.5″ SATA 1 / SATA II orSAS 3.0 Gbpsdrives
- Expandableby hot-swapping drives with larger ones. Use our capacity calculator to estimate available storage in various configurations. Go to Capacity Calculator.
BeyondRAID Features
- Thin Provisioning
- Instant Expansion
- Mixed Drive Size Utilization
- Automatic Protection Levels
- Dual Disk Redundancy
- Virtual Hot Spare
- Data Aware
- Drive Re-ordering
Additional Features
- Data-Aware Tiering
- Smart Volumes (LUNs, up to 255)
- Drive Spin Down
- Drobo Copy
- Field-replaceable controller, power supplies, and fan unit
Ethernet Features
- Connection failover
- Jumbo Frames (up to 9000 bytes MTU)
Network Protocols
- iSCSI
- CHAP Authentication
Operating System Support
- Windows 2008 Server R2 SP1 64 bit
- Windows 2003 Server R2 SP1 32 and 64 bit
- Windows XP SP1 32 and 64 bit
- Windows Vista SP1 32 and 64 bit
- Windows 7 SP1 32 and 64 bit
- Mac OS 10.5.8 or later (Intel Only)
- Mac OS Server 10.5.8 or later (Intel Only)
- VMware vSphere 4.x
- Citrix XenServer 5.6
File System Options
- Windows: NTFS
- Mac OS X: HFS+
- VMware: VMFS
Certified Applications
- VMware vSphere 4.x
- Citrix XenServer 5.6
- Symantec Backup Exec 2010
Management
- Drive bay indicator lights, capacity gauge, status lights
- Drobo Dashboard version 2.1 or later
- Drobo-initiated email notifications
- SNMP
Size and Weight
- Width: 17.17 in (436.1 mm)
- Height: 5.20 in (132.1 mm) – 3 rack units
- Depth: 21.85 in (555.0 mm)
- Weight: 47lbs (21.3 kg)
Power and Cooling
- Dual, redundant, hot-swappable power supplies
- Hot-swappable cooling fanunit
Warranty
- One (1) year warranty in the US or outside the EU, or two (2) year warranty in the EU (as provided by EU law).
Box Contents
- Drobo model B1200i
- 2 x 6′ power cord
- Quick Start Instructions
- User Guide
- Resource CD, includes:
- Drobo Dashboard application
- Help files
- Electronic Documentation
This is actually very aggressively price for what it is. The closest thing is Equallgic, which starts at almost double. Then again with Equallogic you can pool multiple units together to get over a petabyte of storage in your SAN – but like I said, it’s perfect for probably 90% of the SMB market out there.
Good stuff! The new 8 bay unit is pretty appealing for me at home – even though it’s also still a little overkill, the thought of not having to mess with disks or RAID is very, very appealing.