Drobo Pro in the Enterprise

Data Robotics, Inc released a ‘pro’ version of the Drobo earlier this summer and made it a very enticing and cost effective device to allow businesses and professionals to add storage to their environment. The Drobo Pro allows you to add up to 8 hard drives in a RAID formation and can withstand two simultaneous drive failures.  It can be connected via USB, Firewire 800, and or iSCSI via an Ethernet jack; making it a very versatile storage solution for all platforms available today.

The device is well built and a lot of thought and effort has gone into its design and functionality from multiple perspectives.  It is easily usable by a end user at home, a professional with high storage requirements, and in the enterprise.  The device offers ease of use for all while simultaneously providing the advanced functionality required by IT Pro’s in the enterprise.  The unit is listed at $1499, without drives, and comes with every cable that one could possibly require (Ethernet, usb, firewire).  Bundles are also available via Drobo with various storage capacities.  For our purposes we bought the unit and 8 x 1TB hard drives.

Enterprise Usage:  Once the Drobo Pro was received it was loaded with all 8 x 1TB drives for the maximum capacity available to us now and for cost efficiency.  We naturally decided to use the iSCSI connectivity for maximum speed via our HP based Proliant servers.  Once you install the drives it is highly recommended to first install the included Drobo Dashboard software and check for updates.  The Drobo Dashboard software will also prompt you to install the Microsoft iSCSI initiator software which will allow the unit to communicate using high speed connectivity over Ethernet cables to a spare jack in your computer/server of choice.  The software is also used to manage the Drobo Pro.  After the software is installed you are clear to plug the Drobo into the port you have decided to use on your server/computer.  The software will prompt you that it has located a Drobo Pro and also prompt you to update firmware, if a newer version is available.  Once firmware is updated it will prompt you to format your Drobo Pro in either NTFS Classic, NTFS, and or HFS…you must also select the maximum capacity for which we chose 16tb for future expansion with 2tb drives.  Here are the initial steps in the process:

• Install Drives
• Install DROBO Dashboard Software on Server
• Reboot Server
• Connect Drobo Pro to either USB Port, Firewire Port, or Ethernet Jack.
• Format Drobo to 16tb for future expansion with 2TB drives

Once our Drobo Pro was formatted it became available to us and we were able to assign it a drive letter for usage.  We did not bother with partitioning since we wanted to manage the data on our own using folders, etc.  The unit was destined for use as a replication partner for Exchange 2007 Databases as well as user files (about 1.5tb in total).  Considering we had about 6tb available to us we also chose to use it for a mid week full backup of all of our servers (2.5tb).  We now had 4tb of data that would be regularly stored on this device and yes, speed was of utmost concern to us.

And so it began, first we asked our Exchange 2007 Server to use a folder on the Drobo Pro for Local Continuous Replication of Databases and Logs, second we setup the Drobo Pro as a DFSR (Microsoft’s file replication technology) partner so that all of our file server data could be replicated, and finally we setup a backup job to backup all servers on Wednesday nights to the Drobo Pro.

The testing begins….(we are now two weeks into this).  Exchange 2007 was reporting a healthy mirror using LCR; part 1 successful.  All of our file server data had replicated and is replicating regularly with no degredation in performance; part 2 successful.  We have now backed up twice using Veritas Backup Exec with speeds in excess of 2598mbps all while Exchange and file servers were replicating; part 3 successful.

We have been using this for 14 days now and love the functionality, enough so that we have ordered another unit to be used for Virtual Machines via VMWARE.

The total cost for us (street price) was under $2,000 to implement 6tb of storage with great redundancy and excellent speed.  Solutions by server vendors and comparable providers were much more costly.

Please be aware that our results may not be similar to your results, every environment varies and thus your results will vary.  The test environment here was for a SMB with 150 users and data as stated above.

Drobo has a great product here and I am sure that more and more enterprises will adopt it as a efficient and cost effective hardware device.

Please share your thoughts and or experiences via the commenting system so we can all benefit from each others knowledge.