How Drobo Keeps Your Data Safer

Data Storage Management

When considering data storage management, the single most important factor is protection. Is your data safe?  The answer may not be an emphatic “yes” unless you are doing several things the right way, and using the right technologies.  No one technology protects you from everything, so answering yes happens when you have the combination of safe storage, reliable backup, offs store protection, and the ability to do all of these regularly and easily.  And affordably too, so you have complete protection.

So, is your data safe from a hard drive failure?  How about unexpected power loss?  Corruption, user-error, accidental deletion?  All of these eventually happen, and using a Drobo the right way combined other technologies will keep you safe from them.  You may never have a catastrophe like a fire, flood, or theft, but you need to keep your data safe, whether on personal storage or IT storage.3-2-1 is possible without a Drobo as well, but Drobo keeps your data safer.

If you want the best data protection available, and it you want it to work automatically, without needing to be an expert in Network Data Storage or Data Storage Management, consider a Drobo.   Drobo has developed a number of technologies and solutions that work to keep your data and your business safe – without the need for that PhD in storage.  Some of these Drobo innovations and advancements include:

BeyondRAID

Sometimes, hard drives fail.  If you haven’t had one fail on you yet, count your blessings and bide your time.  Hard drives are amazing devices, but they are electro-mechanical machines that utilize high-precision physics.  They fail.  You want to make sure that your network data storage system is resilient to hard drive failures, and it this category there is nothing that compares to a Drobo.  Beyond the basic protection you expect from RAID (hence the name), Drobo systems continuously scrub data in the background to fix disk errors before they happen.  If there are too many errors, we proactively purge the drive and rebuilt using the available space on other drives.  To see more on how we do it, check out our whiteboard session.

Power Protection

Sometimes, the power goes out. Unexpected power outages are one of the most common causes of data loss. It is usually because you have not saved work, but when it comes to storage systems, they too need to “save” all data in-flight to disk before the lights go out. You should always have your IT storage connected to a UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) so brownouts and blackouts don’t affect you – but that’s like saying that you should floss every day.  And, when a UPS runs out of battery, you get a power outage.  Drobo protects your data with battery-backed cache so that in the event of spurious, unexpected, or catastrophic power failures – the Drobo will gracefully shut down so data is fully saved.  This is a feature that you just don’t see in the Drobo price category – but you might find it in enterprise IT storage systems that cost 5 to 25 times as much as a Drobo.

Offsite Backup and Replication

Sometimes, disasters happen at your home or office.  Drobo by itself does not protect against these calamities, but we can help you keep a copy of your data in a different location.   Drobo makes it easy by testing and integrating with the world’s best offsite backup and replication solutions, and providing how-to guides on putting the solutions together.  They include Hypervisor-based replication solutions like  VMware vSphere replication and Microsoft Hyper-V Replica, or backup applications like Veeam, Symantec, and Acronis, and even cloud solutions like Amazon Web Services (AWS) Storage Gateway or  Barracuda Copy for your IT storage.  Doing offsite backup and replication is often easier and lower cost than you might think, especially if you have not looked at the new options in a while.

RAID devices can keep your data safe, the way they have for 25+ years.  But little has changed since the invention or RAID in the 80s.  Drobo keeps your data safer with a newer, more advanced approach to data protection and data storage management.  And even better, it is usually lower cost to purchase, most often less expensive to expand, and always easier to use, so you spend time on other things.  Let the storage experts figure these things out and automate them for you!  That’s what we do.

If you would you like to learn more about the experience of a Drobo, request a Drobo for business live demo here. We also have set Drobo solutions for your IT or data concerns that can be seen here. Find us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+.

The post Data Storage Management: How Drobo Keeps Your Data Safer appeared first on Drobo Performance Blog.

Drobo Performance when your drives break

A hard drive failure is a question of when, not if.  You need to be prepared and protected to maintain a high level of Drobo performance. Every day in our live demos and on live chat we talk with individuals and business owners who are looking for more info on how they can be better protected.  Do you have data storage solutions that you are protecting?  According to a poll by SanDisk conducted by Harris Interactive: “Photos are so precious that 64 percent of U.S. adults would not consider destroying their family photo collection for any amount of money, not even for one million dollars.”  The folks that contact us for help understand the value of their data.  Do you feel your data is worth $1M, and are you doing everything to protect it from inevitable hard drive failure?

If you are prepared, you already have a redundant storage solution that protects your first copy from a hard drive failure.  And, you also have multiple backups, both local and off-site to protect from other calamities.  If you don’t, you are not alone, because most do not have the right data storage solution.  If you don’t, it means the data for your business is at risk or all of those priceless photos and memories can be lost.  We buy insurance to protect our cars, houses, and other property to the tune of thousands of dollars of cost each year, but for data storage much of it is on laptops, individual drives, and other single devices that are not protected.  Let’s talk about preparing for the path toward protection.

RAID was created in the mid-1980s to serve businesses.  No, not the bug spray you may first think of when you hear the word Raid; RAID stands for redundant array of independent devices.  RAID is almost as old as computers with hard drives.  Because it was made for techies, it requires a good deal of technical knowledge. You need to know what type of RAID you need, how to set up it up, how to manage a hot spare drive for redundancy, and so on and so forth.  RAID also forces identical hard drive models within the system. It protects against drive failures for sure, but RAID makes data storage solutions data storage tedious and potentially expensive if you need someone to manage it for you.

In short, Drobo BeyondRAID gives you the redundancy benefit of RAIDs without the downsides and some extras on the top.  Let’s say a drive failure happens.  You’re working on an important time-sensitive video project.  What do you do? Nothing! Drobo automatically recovers from this failure and gets you back to a protected state to manage the next time a drive might fail.  If you want to expand, pop the existing failed drive out and put in a new one.  No tricks, it’s that plain simple.  What if the drive you have available is a different size or from a different manufacturer?  With Drobo, it does not matter. Drobo is data storage solution without the worry or hassle.

Protecting your first copy is the first step and how to survive a drive failure, much better than restoring from backup.  Now, Step 2 still requires you to have a backup, to protect against file corruption on your first copy.  Step 3 is getting a backup off-site to protect from losing the entire location to a fire, theft, flood, etc.  More to discuss in another blog, and Drobo is great storage for storing on-site and off-site backups, too.  3-2-1—or three copies of data, on two types of media, one of them off-site—is the right protection to aim for.  I won’t ask if you are doing all of those, but I can say there are people in my family that are not doing it all (yet).

If you want the most powerful and user-friendly way to survive a disk failure, you owe it to yourself to put Drobo on your data storage short list. If you would you like to learn more about the experience of a Drobo, request a Drobo for business live demo here. Find us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+.

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