Details
BeyondRAID™ Technology
Every Drobo product comes with the revolutionary BeyondRAID storage technology — the next generation of redundant disk protection. BeyondRAID not only keeps your data safe, but will also increases uptime and availability. BeyondRAID technology offers several improvements over traditional RAID-based storage systems, including the flexibility to replace failed disks, increase capacity and with a single click switch between single- and dual-disk redundancy, all without costly downtime.
Key features of BeyondRAID include:
- Data protection against hard disk failure
- Instant capacity expansion without downtime
- Self-management
- Automatic healing
Multi-host Connectivity
The DroboElite connects seamlessly to your existingTCP/IP network and utilizes industry-standard iSCSI protocol with optional CHAP authentication to provide simple, consolidated iSCSI storage for your servers.
File and Operating System Agnostic
DroboElite and its underlying BeyondRAID technology currently support the Windows, Mac, VMware, and Linux¹ platforms, with file system support for NTFS, HFS+, EXT3, and VMFS. Since DroboElite is a block-level system, it easily adapts to almost any environment.
Mixed Drive Capacity Utilization
Grow your storage to meet your data capacity needs with minimal effort. To add capacity, customers can simply insert a new hard disk or replace the smallest disk with a larger one, even when all eight disk bays are full. Unlike traditional RAID systems, the BeyondRAID technology enables IT managers to efficiently mix and match disk brands, capacities and speeds. This allows for continuous expansion as disk capacities grow. Expansion is automatic, instantaneous and access to data is always maintained.
Redundant Safety
Utilizing dual-disk redundancy, DroboElite’s BeyondRAID technology can ensure your data is safe even if up to two drives fail simultaneously — all without a moment of downtime. You can even switch between single- and dual-disk redundancy with a single click. You’ll feel safer knowing that if drives do fail, DroboElite automatically enters a state of self-healing in which it relays out your data across the remaining healthy drives and sectors. If a drive fails, BeyondRAID technology always returns the drive array back to the safest state possible.
Proportional Rebuild Times
The time it takes DroboElite to rebuild data after a drive failure or removal is proportional to the amount of data stored in the pool — meaning the less capacity that is used, even on a 2TB disk, the shorter your rebuild times. This is superior to traditional RAID, which lacks proportional rebuild times, and is forced relay out every drive block even if it does not contain user data.
Since DroboElite is “Data Aware”, it tracks where data is on each drive, so it can differentiate between used and unused portions of the drive. This expedites rebuild times and reduces your risk of losing data to an additional disk drive failure. In short, your data is safer on a Drobo.
Thin Provisioning
Thin provisioning is a technical term that describes how the BeyondRAID technology communicates with your operating system. BeyondRAID communicates with your OS about how much drive space you have; up to 16TB per volume.¹ Specifying a larger amount of storage than is physically available allows you to grow into the volume without having to reformat or migrate your data in order to add capacity.
Self-Healing
When DroboElite detects a "bad" hard drive, it proactively advises you with a series of warnings ranging from a blinking red LED on its front panel, to pop-up alerts in Drobo Dashboard and email alerts. What DroboElite does next is exceptional. It enters a self-healing mode where it repairs around the bad sector or drive, and works until it returns to the safest state possible. If DroboElite has sufficient time and free capacity (indicated by all lights returning to a solid green state), it can even withstand additional hard disk failures — that's the power of self-healing.
Self-Managing
DroboElite is iSCSI SAN storage that manages itself. There are no complex configuration screens, confounding choices, or other complications that prevent so many other storage devices from working out of the box. For companies that need simple, consolidated storage for multiple servers but don’t want to deal with the complexities of traditional SANs, DroboElite is the ideal solution.
Setup can be completed in a matter of minutes and routine tasks such as expanding capacity are as simple as adding a drive or replacing the smallest drive in the array. No need to back up data or re-create a RAID array. DroboElite will automatically recognize the additional capacity and make it immediately available to all Smart Volumes and applications.
Smart Volumes™
Create new volumes in seconds and manage up to 255 volumes over time with ease. The innovative and timesaving Smart Volume management technology integrated into DroboElite allows volumes to pull storage from the common pool of drives rather than a specific physical drive allocation, eliminating the need to manage capacity at the volume level. Smart Volumes are also data aware, allowing deleted data blocks to be returned to the common pool and ensuring that volumes remain as efficient as possible over time.
Storage Virtualization
BeyondRAID was designed from the ground up to allow the storage capacity of the array to expand and contract. BeyondRAID makes this a simple process by utilizing a technology called “virtualization.” Virtualization provides a layer of abstraction between the data requested, by the file system, and the physical location of that data on the disk drives. A given piece of data can be located on any drive, and on any physical location on that drive. This is what makes adding a drive to a DroboElite so simple. The new drive just provides additional places to store data.
Virtualization is what enables BeyondRAID to effortlessly change the data arrangement on the drives, for example, changing data stored as a mirror into data stored as parity stripe without interrupting the user access to data. Virtualization completely decouples the physical space available in the array from the space reported to the operating system. This is how BeyondRAID is able to eliminate the need to manually expand/contract the file system as more space becomes available or is removed.
Drive Reordering
One long-standing requirement inherent in traditional RAID-based systems was that, if for some reason you needed to remove the drives, you’d have to replace them in the exact same order. When you remove your disks from DroboElite, you can put them back in any order you like.