Question

Drobo Pro a good product?

Asked by: MaCuban

I am looking into this as a solution for file storage in the office.  Does anyone have any experience or feedback?
We will likely use it to host our DFS filestore (over iSCSI), and it will have operationally critical data on it.  We would like to migrate our file server off of a 6yr old box and this looks to offer reasonable redundancy (at the disk level) for the cost.  Response time and sustained throughputs for the device are not concerns for us, even the operations critical stuff.

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Asked On
2009-11-04 at 14:14:45ID24872732
Tags

Drobo pro

,

storage

,

raid

,

NAS

Topics

Storage Technology

,

Hard Drives & Storage

,

File Servers

Participating Experts
1
Points
250
Comments
4

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Answers

 

by: eabeukesPosted on 2009-11-26 at 00:28:13ID: 25913978

The Drobo is great (looking) product however there are some major disadvantages:
- proprietry file system (no sending off to recovery experts when it fails)
- poor support
- iscsi to a single host only
- Drobo-RAID (no idea of how this works etc)

It its favour:
- ease of use
- dual-disk failure is supported
- can use differing disk sizes in the same array
- 'hands-off' array expansion and migration

I woul rather (for the money) look at a QNAP809 ( http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=109 ) - you can get these with the same storage for around the same price. It will give you much more flexibility ('proper' iscsi, CIFS, NFS, AD domain capability) as well as running Linux underneath in case anything ever goes wrong.

 

by: eabeukesPosted on 2009-11-26 at 00:37:57ID: 25914009

On second thoughts, if you have budget for the Drobo Elite model then go for that - it blows away all the issues of the Pro (bar the poor support but YMMV) - it's actually quite good. I think they do demo units as well if you ask nicely.

 

by: MaCubanPosted on 2009-12-11 at 07:53:18ID: 26029214

EAbeukes, Thanks for your input sorry for the long response time... That alternative is interesting i was not aware of the product.  the QNAP seems to be tried true and reliable.  However in our environment our data constantly changing, growing and shrinking day to day.  I like how expandability is entirely On Demand.  Regardless i am going to pursue your suggestion even deeper, and if we ever make a decisions i will add it to the discussion...

 

by: MaCubanPosted on 2009-12-11 at 07:54:28ID: 31650268

I was looking for advice on the drobo product itself, but the comments were usefull.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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