Drobo B810i NEW firmware release: 1.3.3 contains important features and
improvement updates that were added from the previous release.
The iSCSI attached B810i recently replaced the venerable DroboElite and B800i products. It allows multiple servers to share the B810i, gaining access to a common pool of (easy to upgrade) storage capacity, running over your Gigabit Ethernet network. Multiple volumes can be created and assigned to different servers, or even shared between servers in a clustered filing system environment using VMWare or HyperV, allowing the small business IT administrator (who is often someone with another full time job!) to consolidate both their servers and storage to a small number of devices, quite possibly a single server, and a single storage array.
We’ve been spending a lot of time validating B810i for use in virtualization environments and are pleased to report that B810i has now achieved VMWare 6 certification. In addition, this release supports Microsoft HyperV, including HyperV clustering. B810i is a great and affordable solution for small business virtualized storage deployments. Many small businesses run a number of servers “virtual machines” (VMs) on a small number of physical servers, and these VMs can be stored on a B810i. Drobo’s Data Aware Tiering & Caching technology allows a couple of SSDs to be added to tbe B810i to gain benefits of both high capacity hard drives, and low latency SSDs.
We originally introduced Data Aware Tiering with our 12-bay Drobo B1200i. Data Aware Tiering enables SSDs to be automatically detected and configured by Drobo into a transactional tier to provide read and write acceleration. We later introduced Data Aware Caching with our 5N and 5D models to deliver read acceleration of the most commonly accessed data. With B810i, we’ve brought those two great technologies together and made them work on the same SSDs at the same time. Drobo B810i will automatically configure the SSDs you give it into the most efficient setup to deliver the best possible acceleration. You get the read and write acceleration from Data Aware Tiering and at the same time even greater read acceleration from Data Aware Caching. All with no configuration, just push in the SSDs and Drobo will figure out what to do.
In addition to virtualization support, B810i has been certified for use with Veritas Backup Exec 2015, and Acronis Backup 11 to provide a full backup solution.
This new firmware release also adds migration support from DroboElite and B800i to B810i. You can move the disks from older products to a B810i and be up and running immediately.
Finally, the release delivers performance improvements and fixes bugs.
By: Jason O’Broin
Jason is the Director of Software Engineering at Drobo and is responsible for all software development. Jason was one of the original engineers at Drobo and has over 25 years of experience in storage, networking and operating systems development gained at Wind River and Madge Networks. He is originally from the UK and gained his Master in Computing Science from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne.
7 years ago