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The Mighty Drobo

Standard storage RAIDs are nice.  They provide a decent option for large storage pools, fast data access and drive failure protection.  But what if you don’t need the fastest data access possible, or can’t afford a large storage pool right away?  RAIDS can be costly, and don’t allow for easy scalability once they are setup. That’s where the Drobo comes in.

Data Robotics Inc. looked at the shortcomings with traditional RAID systems, and decided to build a product to overcome them.  On June 5, 2007 they introduced what they referred to as “the first fully automated storage robot designed to ensure that data is always protected, storage capacity is unlimited and is exceptionally easy to expand.”  Essentially, a RAID which can be expanded dynamically and in a non-destructive manner.

Since then, I have had multiple successful experiences deploying Drobos as onsite backup destinations, but with the addition of Firewire 800 (the original was USB 2.0 only), I was always curious about how well it would work as a main network storage pool.  After a long time coming, I finally got my opportunity.

I had an ad firm of about a dozen workstations in need of a centralized, protected pool of data with a low price tag.  They weren’t dealing with video; only print and web, so they didn’t need a high performance RAID system.  My thoughts immediately went to the Drobo, and after stating potential downsides to the system (possible slow speed; unproven in business as primary storage), they were willing to give it a shot.

Deployment was a snap.  Installing drives into the Drobo was a cinch, and the Drobo Dashboard software walked me through configuration.  It first finds that the Drobo has not been initialized, and politely asks if you would like to go ahead and format(Data Robotics recommends formatting with the Drobo Dashboard – not with a standard drive utility).  Once you select yes, it then asks for you to make a volume size, which you can set to be up to 16TB (only 2TB for those XP users out there).  This is called ‘Thin Provisioning’ and the purpose of this is so your operating system has a set volume size that it can work with, even if you don’t have the tangible drives to make up this volume.  This allows you to grow into it as your storage needs increase.  All in all, the whole process from unboxing to having an up and running protected volume spanned a mere 30 minutes.

Now it was time to migrate the data.  Data Robotics states that a Drobo running over Firewire 800 will work at a sustained 35MB/Sec.  That was not my experience.  To make a long story short, my transfer (1.8TB) averaged somewhere around 15MB/sec when it was all said and done.  Small files seemed to give it the most trouble.

Initially, this caused some concern that it wouldn’t be able to keep up with the demands of multiple user access, but my worries were quickly put to rest.  While still somewhat slower than a traditional RAID system, users were still able to simultaneously access their files over gigabit at between 10MB/sec and 18MB/sec, which for the projects they were working on was definitely in the usability range. It would seem that while working with larger files only, the Drobo’s performance picks up drastically.

In the end, the customer was happy with the performance, and more than happy with the protection and scalability the Drobo offered.  They were so happy, in fact, that they purchased a matching Drobo to use as their onsite backup destination.

All of the above was done with the standard consumer level Drobo.  Since its introduction, they have released an array of products meeting different levels of needs, including high performance.  The Drobo Pro looks to be an interesting product with it’s ability to be rackmounted, and it’s Gigabit iSCSI interface (there’s also the DroboS with an upgrade in performance over the consumer grade product; and the Drobo Elite, which promises to bring Drobo technology into a SAN product).  My own internal testing has shown that the Drobo Pro can provide high performance access, but personally I have yet to deploy it into a real world environment.  If I ever get the opportunity, I’ll let you know.