Drobo 5N

All prosumer Drobos now include an Accelerator Bay on the underside of the unit.  This feature allows for the use of an SSD to accelerate access to the most frequently accessed data, while still offering the expansive storage capacity of the traditional hard disks.  By combining disk technologies, the Drobo provides transactional performance for workspace storage that wouldn’t be possible in an all-HDD configuration.  The addition of an mSATA SSD increases the IOPS performance of the unit by three times, and significantly reduces access times when working from a network share with a very large number of files or directories on the Drobo 5N.

When shopping for an mSATA card for your Drobo, the first step is consulting the SSD drive support page on the Drobo website.  This page includes an up-to-date list of supported and known unsupported drives.   As SSD technology continues to evolve, drives do not universally handle low-level disk operations in the same manner.  That said, the mSATA disks included on the drive compatibility page on the Drobo site have been tested by Drobo engineers to ensure they support all features required by the storage system.

Drobo customers demand expansive storage from their units and may be tempted to “go big” on the mSATA card.  While the Drobo currently supports up to a 640GB mSATA SSD, the recommended capacity is 64GB to 128GB.  This may seem small when compared with the HDDs in the unit, but it represents an expansive amount of cache storage.  As the Drobo works at the block level, only transactional portions of data are cached on the mSATA.  A 64GB mSATA card provides more than sufficient space for even the most demanding workloads.

If you’re considering adding an mSATA card to your all-SSD Drobo, there’s no need.  Your Drobo is already configured for maximum performance.

If you would you like to learn more about the experience of a Drobo, request a Drobo for business live demo here or find us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+.

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Drobo Dashboard

Drobo is designed from the ground up to be simple, hands-off storage. When it comes to configuration and management of the device, asking our customers to remember IP addresses, hostnames, or web URLs didn’t fit our objectives. While the light-based alerting system on the front panel allows for nearly all operations to be performed without the need to launch the Drobo Dashboard, there are some initial configuration tasks that must be performed with this tool.

After installing and launching the Drobo Dashboard on a Windows or OSX system, it will automatically detect all direct attached, network-attached, and iSCSI Drobos available to manage. All Drobos deployed in the environment can be managed and monitored from this single interface. For new deployments, the Dashboard is used to set IP address information, single- or dual-disk redundancy, and optional alerting via email. The Drobo automatically provides visual alerts, and pop-up alerts are sent to all hosts with the Drobo Dashboard installed.

Once configured, the Dashboard is used to create volumes and map them to the host. Since the Dashboard is the universal administration utility for all Drobos, volumes (or shares) are automatically formatted and mapped to the host computer in just a few clicks, no matter the interface type. There is no need to remember network share paths, configure iSCSI initiators, or use operating system partitioning, or formatting tools. On Windows or OSX systems, the Drobo Dashboard handles all of these tasks. For customers with more advanced IT knowledge or requirements, you still have the freedom to manually configure or map volumes.

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+

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Drobo

Drobo recommends that when researching storage devices, the primary performance metric is throughput.  A quick scan of web reviews reveals that a majority of the focus is on how quickly the device can read or write large files. Think drag-and-drop. While this is a great metric if your device will primarily be used for data archive and backups, one must also consider IOPS performance as it relates to as workspace storage. IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per second) performance is measured by how quickly the device can work with small bits of data.

The first sign that you might not have sufficient IOPS comes with slow response times within the application. If you’re waiting for the application to move between screens or files, the disk subsystem may be working at its maximum IOPS capacity. This not only slows the application, but also incurs significant latency.

While adding additional rotational drives to the RAID system will improve both throughput and IOPS performance, the benefits are limited by the low IOPS rating of the HDDs. Moving to an all SSD configuration vastly improves performance, but comes with a significant reduction in capacity.

All modern Drobos include support for automated Data-Aware Tiering. This technology was first introduced with the Drobo B1200i iSCSI business SAN, and is now available on all prosumer models. With the addition of an accelerator bay to the bottom of the device, it allows the Drobo to take advantage of the high IOPS performance of a SSD, while still offering the expansive storage space of a HDD. The Drobo uses the SSD in the accelerator bay to cache hot data, providing accelerated performance to the data you use most frequently. With the addition of the mSATA SSD, the IOPS performance of the Drobo is three times what is possible in a five drive all-HDD configuration.

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+.

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