Some may disagree (or refuse to admit) that today we are dead in the midst of a significant paradigm shift as it relates to data storage.  What I am referring to primarily is “general purpose” data storage, the type of storage that 60% – 70% of the data at any given company could reside upon.

For years the storage industry was driven by the manufacturers.  As drive technologies improved, capacities increased, and companies began listening to the iSCSI story, storage manufacturers engaged in a bloody battle to develop and bring to market more intelligent, user friendly storage solutions.  We then had the SCSI and Fibre Channel drive guys touting that SATA is not reliable enough as primary storage, so more advanced levels of RAID were introduced to offer increased protection against disk failures.  Then along came the “feature set” wars over whose technology has better snapshots, more efficient thin provisioning, dynamic expansion, replication, etc.  This was coupled with the arguments around which protocol was “faster”, Fibre Channel or iSCSI.

Well, as the dust settled what did we learned?  We learned that there is multi-billion dollars worth of end users who are tired of paying premiums for overkill storage solutions and want lower cost, more simplistic storage.  And the evolution of iSCSI and ATA/SATA drive technology had offered that, somewhat.  After all, bundled in that “low cost, all inclusive” iSCSI SAN array you purchased back 2005 were inexpensive $2,000 500GB SATA disk drives.

Today, there are two significant events quietly developing within the industry:

1. Storage manufacturers are losing their control to the end user
2. As disk drives continue to get larger and larger, the concept and benefits around traditional raid as we know it today are diminishing.

End users, more than ever are demanding lower cost storage.  They are beginning to recognize that the big picture is more about the management of the data, rather than the storage itself.  Because of this, manufacturers have lost the control they once had and companies are paying less for storage.  This has resulted in storage becoming a commodity.

The other significant event that is occurring is that with drive capacities already as large as 2TB, and with 3TB and 4TB drives just around the corner, traditional RAID is presenting some great challenges for storage administrators.

Take a typical 14-drive RAID set for instance.  With 3TB drives you are looking at 42TB of storage.  Can you imagine how long it would take to rebuild that 42TB RAID set?  A week, maybe two?  And you haven’t even begun to restore data yet!

With the size of a disk drive today, the benefits of traditional RAID are going away.  This is why it’s an absolute must for companies to begin taking a closer look at the management of data, and depend less upon the reliability of the storage itself.

For example:  if you are running an active archive solution such as FileTek’s StorHouse, that enables functions such as transparent file integrity audits and block level file repair, you don’t have to rely as heavily upon RAID because StorHouse is protecting the data.  Furthermore, if a production disk should fail you have immediate access to a copy of the data directly from within the active archive; therefore you completely eliminate the need to rebuild the RAID and then perform a restore procedure just so you can access the data.  The data is available for immediate access while you rebuild the system.

DROBO

The industry buzz (or perhaps better defined as rage) over Data Robotics DroboElite exemplifies this change in the storage landscape, and offers a glimpse into where storage technologies are heading.

When I talked to one of my customers who was interested the Drobo I really knew nothing about the product.  He saw the system at a trade show the a few days later called me up wanting to purchase one.  So to be truthful, I was a bit of a skeptic.  It was actually somewhat odd because here I am talking to a customer and he is selling me on the box that I am about to sell him!

As I started talking with other customers I learned that there is this huge cult-like following of this Drobo appliance.  I started learning more about this system and took a look at it myself, and I immediately “got it”.  Here is a closer look…

First, let’s get the important stuff out of the way.  A fully loaded 16TB DroboElite has an MSRP of less than $6,300.  No, that is not a mistake!  For that price, there isn’t a company in the world that doesn’t have some sort of use case for a DroboElite, whether it’s departmental use, cheap D2D backup, public file storage, archive, vmware, video storage, and many others for sure.

The DroboElite is an 8-bay storage device that can be rackmount or desktop and has dual iSCSI interface ports.  This system supports up to 16 iSCSI clients and up to 255 volumes (Smart Volumes).  The Smart Volumes can pull storage from the common pool of disk rather than specific physical drives.  This eliminates the need for features such as Thin Provisioning (mentioned above) because you no longer need to manage capacity at the volume level.

The system is designed upon their BeyondRAID technology.  This is the “secret sauce”.  BeyondRAID eliminates many of the inherent shortcomings of traditional RAID that I mentioned earlier by taking standard RAID algorithms and applying them on top of a flexible storage virtualization architecture.  For instance, with BeyondRAID you can mix/match various drive capacities in the same system and the Drobo utilizes the full capacity.  With traditional RAID this is impossible.  All of the drives would be formatted to the smallest drive size in the group.

The DroboElite also has self-healing technology built in.  The Drobo will monitor and repair bad drive blocks transparently without any performance degradation.  Additionally, if a drive should fail the Drobo automatically redistributes the data across the available drives at that time to maintain the highest level of protection and performance.  NOTE: This was very cool.  I was watching a movie and pulled a drive out right in the middle of it and didn’t miss a beat.  In fact the only difference was the flashing LED’s that indicate the drive went bad and the data was being redistributed on the fly.

Another cool feature is the “on-the-fly” expansion.  You can insert a new drive, or even replace a drive with higher capacity, and the system automatically expands the available storage and redistributes the data across the available drives.  Not even a single mouse click!

BeyondRAID supports single or dual drive redundancy (equivalent to RAID 5 and RAID 6).  However, unlike traditional RAID where you need to reformat the array to change parity levels, the DroboElite allows you to switch between single and dual drive redundancy with the data in tact by the click of a button.

The bottom line is the DroboElite is a very cool product at an unbelievable price point.  I realize it may sound as though I’m blowing some smoke (or perhaps inhaling).  Don’t get me wrong.  Like any other storage device, the DroboElite has its target market and I’m certainly not suggesting that you go out and replace your tier one primary SAN with a bunch of DroboElite’s.  However, the concept around the Drobo technology is very appealing and the simplistic approach to the technology is what the future holds for general purpose storage solutions.   If you don’t believe me, call me and I would be happy to send you out a free demo system to evaluate for yourself.

For the record, I would bet the farm you have some data that is taking up disk space on your expensive tier one storage that can absolutely be “Drobo’d”!

Rob Oddo

(800) 828-0599 Ext 225

Email: roddo@chicorporation.com

Skype: rob.oddo

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