Drobo today brought out its first range of Drobo business drives aimed both at companies and at home users with very high demands such as video editing and very large data bases.
The eight-bay B800fs and B800i, as well as the 12-bay B1200i, are speed-optimized beyond their regular counterparts and have new management tools along with extra after-the-sale support and services. All have been certified to work with Citrix, Exchange, SharePoint, Symantec backup, and VMware.
The B800fs as the starter is intended for a simple network file sharing pool and has the option of remote backup in addition to the Drobo’s signature hot-swappable, automatically balancing array. The B800i is intended as a SAN (storage area network) and can link up over iSCSI to create a seemingly transparent storage base for a server or a workgroup. Opting for a B1200i both gets the extra four drive bays as well as extra redundancy features such as data-aware tiering and the option of thin provisioning.
Both of the eight-bay drives are shipping immediately. Reservations are underway for the B1200i, with shipments starting sometime during the spring.
