Drobo to Enter 2012 on High Note with Customer and Industry Milestones

Company Ships 200,000th System as New B1200i Wins Industry Awards and Extends Drobo Presence in Business Accounts

SAN JOSE, Calif. – December 15, 2011 – Drobo, makers of award-winning data storage products for businesses and professionals, today announced that its customers have now deployed over 200,000 Drobo storage systems, and that its new Drobo B1200i has garnered both industry awards and new customer momentum. The company also announced that—for the first time and buoyed by the new B1200i—over half of its revenue is attributed to Drobo products designed specifically for business.

“I’d really like to thank our customers and partners,” said Tom Buiocchi, CEO at Drobo. “We are poised to enter 2012 as a vastly improved and transformed company with over half our revenue from business products, exciting new data tiering technology, a breakthrough new platform in the B1200i and fantastic new partnerships.”

Recent achievements and milestones include:

• Introduction of the Drobo B1200i. The new 12-drive iSCSI SAN array builds on Drobo’s “Small Box, Big Storage” approach, delivering a leading combination of automation, affordability and application awareness for the small and medium business (SMB) market. The company has already secured hundreds of new B1200i customers in manufacturing, government, entertainment, financial and education markets.
• Product Award Wins. The B1200i also has earned industry recognition, winning several industry awards including: Gold Medal Winner for SMB Hardware in the Tech Awards Circle Best of Tech 2011 and Silver Medal for Best Storage Hardware in the 2011 Windows IT Pro Editors’ Best Awards. In addition, the Drobo B800i recently won a CRN 2011 Tech Innovator Award in the Storage category.
• Customer Growth. Drobo’s 200,000th system sold represents a milestone that few other storage companies have achieved. Customers continue to buy and use Drobo storage arrays because of their ease-of-use, affordability, automated data protection, drive flexibility, and ease-of-expansion.
• New Strategic Partnerships. In the second half of 2011, Drobo has strengthened its position in cloud storage, virtualization and digital media via recently announced partnerships with Carbonite, Veeam and PogoPlug, respectively.

“Our business customers want sophisticated storage services but aren’t willing to pay big enterprise prices,” said Wade Yeaman, CEO of Fluid-Consulting. “Drobo's business products deliver affordable performance that optimizes our remote backup and Recovery as a Service (RaaS) offerings, which have proven to be very popular with our small and medium company customer base. We're very pleased to be a partner in Drobo's continued success.”

About Drobo

Drobo makes award-winning data storage products for small and medium businesses and individual professionals 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 small and medium businesses 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.

####

Drobo, DroboPro, DroboElite, BeyondRAID, and Smart Volumes are trademarks of Drobo, Inc., which may be registered in some jurisdictions. All other names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

Media Contact:
Scott Lechner
Kulesa Faul for Drobo
(650) 340-1987
Scott@kulesafaul.com