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Where to now for the data robot?

Limited options one way but wide open another

Comment Data Robotics has the great mass of business data centre computing closed off but the small business market is wide open and waiting for Drobo-isation.

We talked to Tom Buiocchi, Data Robotics CEO, and also to Paul Thackeray, the EMEA VP, to get a picture of the Drobo company just after it had announced its refreshed 8-bay business Drobo line and its new top-end 12-bay product with thin provisioning and automated tiering.

The Drobo (Data ROBOt) is a unique product in terms of its feature set, which includes the so-called Beyond RAID protection, which enables users to populate the Drobo's drive bays with their own choice of 3.5-inch drives, choosing their own manufacturer and capacity levels. The user interface is a simple one based on red, blue and green indicator lights. These indicate drive health as well as capacity uptake, thus signalling when a drive update is needed to add more capacity.

Lastly the Drobo has a neat curvy cornered black enclosure. These three features don't sound much, but we understand that the firmware behind Beyond RAID, the key Drobo attribute, took two years to produce. We also understand that Data Robotics' founder Geoff Barrall had a very particular idea of what the device would look like, its features, and how it should present them to users. He was, we believe, quite persistent and insistent that the Drobo device should match his conception.

Today there is still no competing product that matches and exceeds the Drobo's functionality and feature set,

After Barrall left and went on to Overland Storage the Data Robotics board appointed Tom Buiocchi, an executive in residence at a Mohr Davidow Ventures, with strong sales and marketing skills among others, as its CEO.

He has helped the company to become more business-oriented. It has a file-sharing (NAS) Drobo and an iSCSI SAN (block access) product, which have both been refreshed in the recent announcement. Now we have the 12-bay product and a new Drobo Dashboard interface, which runs on a connected host server and shows the status, health and capacity take-up of a set of Drobos.

The 12-bay is a 3U rackmount unit and there is talk of a dual controller unit coming, also of a 2.5-inch drive version which would have more drive spindles, and we understand that 4TB drives are supported with testing under way or about to start.

The SSDs for the 12-slot box will be third-party ones qualified by Data Robotics, not supplied by Data Robotics. Expect mainstream SAS/SATA 3.5-inch SSDs to be on the list or, maybe, 2.5-inch ones in 3.5-inch carriers.

Drobo revenues

How well has Data Robotics done? There are some 150,000 Drobo customers with fewer than 200,000 units sold.

Next page: Drobo directions

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