Drobo
Introducing DroboPro, the first business class storage array that manages itself. Engineered to be both simple and scalable, the revolutionary BeyondRAID™ technology incorporated into DroboPro frees businesses of making the difficult and confining choices commonly associated with storage management. Why trade simplicity for safety, or stability for expandability? DroboPro delivers both enterprise-level data safety and unprecedented expandability, featuring single and dual disk redundancy combined with instant capacity expansion. Once you experience DroboPro, you just might forget the differences between all eleven traditional RAID levels. If you do, don’t panic. You’re experiencing the peace of mind that comes with every Drobo® product.
Grow your storage in line with your data capacity needs with minimal effort. To add capacity, simply insert a new hard disk or replace your smallest disk with a larger one, even when all eight disk bays are full. Unlike traditional RAID systems, the BeyondRAID technology found in DroboPro enables you to mix n’ match disk brands, capacities and speeds. This allows continuous expansion as disk capacities grow. With DroboPro expansion is automatic, instantaneous and access to data is always maintained.
More info: Drobo.com
What is the benefit of Drobo vs cloud computing?
Thanks.
Hi Jim – there are some key differences, which will be important to the end user depending on their requirements, Cloud computing is essentially a scalable infrastructure of servers spread over the world wide web, essentially in physically remote locations – either for aggregated processing power or storage space. You won’t own the devices or even know where they are in the world. This shared infrastructure is low on cost. Typical examples of cloud computing are P2P networks like bittorrent.
Drobo is aimed at those who want physical control of their hardware and direct access and total control of their data, it allows seamless installation and removal of physical hard drives, falling within the concept of RAID (redundant array of independant disks) technology, allowing you to store data over multiple disks without ever seeing any partitions between them.
Key difference – cloud computing: partitioned and remote access to your data, a communications medium. Drobo: benefit of one “unified” drive access, benefit of “on the fly” storage addition – very easy, specifically a storage medium. Ability to “daisy-chain” multiple drobos – essentially forming a cloud network of its own. Since Drobo supports 4 drives into one “unified” drive it can technically support 3 simultaenous drive failures – in cloud computing that data would simply be lost or unavailable if one node (server) went down. Thus a huge selling point of Drobo is data protection.