ESG Lab Report Confirms Drobo's B1200i Performance, Ease-of-Use and Advanced Features for SMBs

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwire - Jul 10, 2012) - Drobo, makers of award-winning data storage products for businesses and professionals, today announced the results of an Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Lab Validation Report* that validates the advanced functionality and performance of the Drobo B1200i storage array for small and medium businesses (SMBs). The review found that the B1200i exceeds the requirements for a virtualized SMB environment in terms of both performance and capacity, and delivers sophisticated storage features, including performance and capacity optimization, data-aware tiering, efficient provisioning and capacity reclamation, and support for virtualized environments. The automation and intuitive design of the B1200i are delivered in a remarkably simple package that any IT generalist can manage.

"The growing complexity of IT can be especially burdensome for SMBs," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. "The Drobo B1200i takes management tasks off the administrator's plate and saves staff time and money. With Drobo, if you need more capacity, you simply add a drive. You don't need to set up or manage RAID groups or re-provision. Want more performance? Add a couple of SSDs, and Drobo figures it all out. It's that easy."

ESG Lab Report: Drobo B1200i
The ESG Lab performed hands-on evaluation and testing of the Drobo B1200i and its ability to support real-world SMB applications and infrastructures in virtual-server environments. Tests assessed the overall impact of Drobo Data-Aware Tiering, which automatically sends transactional data to the SSD tier for high performance and non-transactional data to bulk drives. Results were measured in terms of accelerated I/O and throughput, and the support of real-world mixed workloads. The complete results can be found at www.drobo.com/performance and include the following:

• The Drobo B1200i with automated tiering easily scales to over 1,200 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes, providing significant headroom for growth for SMBs.
• The B1200i also achieved exceptional response times for mixed, real-world workloads, including e-mail plus file serving plus online transaction processing (OLTP). The B1200i scaled to support a database for 43 concurrent users (approximately 4,300 customers) and a server workload of over 10,000 users.
• The flagship Drobo system also demonstrated strong streaming performance of nearly 300 MB/sec for data protection, video on demand, and other capacity-oriented applications. 

SMB Meet SSD
ESG credits Drobo's patent-pending automated tiering software, which takes advantage of the performance benefits of small, affordable solid-state drives (SSDs) to accelerate performance. SSDs have traditionally been too expensive for SMBs and have required too much management expertise. Per ESG, the B1200i "enables SMBs to affordably deploy capacity and performance together without having to sacrifice one for the other. Intelligent, automated tiering enables SMBs to speed application performance in a cost-effective solution without increasing management tasks up front and over time as characteristics change."

"Our customers demand the best storage experience ever, and we intend to keep delivering it," said Tom Buiocchi, CEO of Drobo. "The ESG Lab findings support the incredible time and money savings that our business customers report." 

The complete ESG Lab Report is available at www.drobo.com/downloads/products/esg-lab-validation-drobo-b1200i-jun-12.pdf, and Drobo business customer success and savings can be found at www.drobo.com/customers/techvalidate.php.

*Source: ESG Lab Report, "Drobo B1200i: Reliable, Easy to Use, Feature-rich Storage for SMB Environments"

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 www.drobo.com or follow us on Twitter @drobo.