Demand for Drobo Continues to Grow With New Customers and Technology That Raise the Performance Bar

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwire - Oct 23, 2012) - Drobo, makers of award-winning data storage products for businesses and professionals, announced today that sales momentum is growing across the product line, fueled by an innovative new technology that accelerates the performance of its offerings for businesses and professionals. Driven by a relentless commitment to deliver sophisticated storage in the easiest, most affordable products, Drobo achieved significant growth milestones in the third quarter with both existing business products and recently introduced prosumer products.

"Our customers are voting early and often, telling us that there is nothing better than a faster Drobo," stated Tom Buiocchi, Drobo CEO. "Our business products eclipsed their previous record sales levels three times in the last month alone, and we have never entered a quarter with as much backlog for new products are we have with our new Drobo 5D and Mini."

Flagship Drobo B1200i SSD Dramatically Boosts Performance

The flagship Drobo B1200i SSD, bolstered by Drobo's automated data-tiering capability, has quickly addressed a wide range of customer use cases. The B1200i SSD easily and affordably allows customers to enjoy the speed benefits of SSD technology alongside the capacity benefits of traditional hard drives. During the past few months the Drobo B1200i SSD:

• Attained VMware Ready status with vSphere 5.0 certification and performance increases of up to 300 percent above previous versions.
• Was validated by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), which demonstrated that the array easily scales to over 1,200 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes and achieves exceptional response times for mixed real-world workloads, including email, file serving and online transaction processing.
• Won the prestigious Gold Stevie^® Award in the Best New Product or Service for Storage Hardware category. More than 3,000 nominations from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted this year for consideration in a wide range of categories.

Drobo B800 Series Adds to Customer Satisfaction with New Models and Pricing 

Drobo's entry-level SAN, the Drobo B800i and its eight-bay file-sharing solution, the Drobo B800fs, continue to excel in backup and secondary storage applications due in large part to Drobo's unique BeyondRAID software. Drobo BeyondRAID features mixed-drive support and automated thin provisioning and reclamation, which allow customers to more easily handle storage-capacity planning and expansion. Drobo recently enhanced the B800 product families with higher-capacity systems and lower pricing, which have helped drive many new deployments, including:

• A leading national broadcast company, which purchased over 100 terabyes (TB) of Drobo storage for backup of important video and files.
• An existing Drobo customer, a regional chain with over 50 locations, which added more than 300TB of B800i capacity to its previously installed 1 petabyte of Drobo storage.
• Many small businesses like Bad Alliteration Films, which use Drobo solutions to save money and get the high performance and self-management that comes with all Drobo products.

"I have a Drobo, and it has worked great for me so far. I love that it self-manages all the drives and the RAID, which helps me keep my budgets low and my resources focused on making my business successful," said Varun Viswanath, film editor and producer at Bad Alliteration Films, an independent studio for feature films in the English and Asian language industries.

Thundering Demand for New Drobo Mini and 5D Driven by Industry Firsts

The company's new Drobo Mini and Drobo 5D storage systems, with pricing starting at $649, introduced a number of industry firsts and unique breakthroughs to the Drobo product line, including:

• The ability to easily and affordably add SSD technology to work in tandem with existing hard drives, giving unprecedented performance acceleration to products in this price category. Based on the same technology that boosts the Drobo B1200i's performance, these new systems uniquely allow customers to incrementally add SSD speed to hard drive capacity for as little as $75.
• The benefit of portability with the Drobo Mini, the industry's smallest full-featured storage array.
• Two Thunderbolt ports, high-speed USB 3.0 connectivity and the ability to chain up to six devices, giving customers ultimate flexibility and I/O speeds for a wide variety of configurations and applications.

Drobo Live - Seeing is Believing  

To help customers visualize and quantify the drastically different simplicity of its new products and technology, Drobo has introduced hourly "Drobo Live" demonstrations and conversations, where customers participate in a live, on-line session with Drobo product and solution experts. In the past three months, the company has hosted more than 4,000 customers and partners worldwide in Drobo Live sessions, helping to spread the word of the "Drobo invasion." For more information, go to http://www.drobo.com/live.

About Drobo

Drobo makes award-winning data storage products that provide an unprecedented combination of sophisticated data protection and management features, affordable capacity, and ease of use. Based on the patented and proven BeyondRAID™ technology, Drobo's ability to deliver "Big Storage in a Small Box" creates the best storage experience ever for hundreds of thousands of SMBs and individual professionals worldwide, who use it to support their file backup and media archiving, server virtualization, and email application needs. To learn more, visit http://www.drobo.com or follow us on Twitter @drobo.