Comments on: Geoff Barrall out as Data Robotics CEO

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:00:16 +0000

No Dave, I don’t think you’re far off base there. It’s my first day with a DroboPro and I’m not very confident in putting this in a remote facility with two ESX servers with just the basic servers (two DCs, a file server, and a print server).

I may end up putting our development SAN back into production and just eat the cost on this Pro… but we’ll see – if it performs fairly well, it’ll at least be better than the MPC dataframe equipment we currently have there (yikes!).

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:47:19 +0000

Yes, drobo-utils works nice if you connect to your drobo using Linux, but it won’t work if your connection is from VMWare ESX. Further, if you have (for instance) 4 volumes on the DroboPro and connect to it with 4 ESX servers (each server one to it’s own volume on the Pro – let’s not even complicate it with clustering for now) and for some reason you want to remove, re-create, or add another volume, you can’t, unless you power down ALL VMs, and then power down ALL ESX servers, and then hook up your laptop to the DroboPro via USB, do the required modifications, and then start up all the ESX servers again after you’ve disconnected your laptop.

So, to summarize: no alerts, no visibility to monitor status, and no ability to do ANY administration as long as you’re up and online. Full shutdown required to do ANYTHING. Does anyone else have serious concerns about VMWare certifying a basically unmanageable device? Does it seem a bit weird all the positive press the DroboPro gets in light of this? Or am I just being dramatic?

By: James B.

James B. — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:32:24 +0000

Dave:

Check out the linux drobo utils for some remote drive status info:

http://drobo-utils.sourceforge.net/

Don’t see any temp or SMART info though.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 21:06:52 +0000

Having been a Drobo early adopter and used their stuff almost from the very start, I must say it is disappointing but not exactly surprising that there are some signs of bumps in the road. Their BeyondRAID technology is quite fascinating to see in action, but it really is their ONLY asset. I’ve used the Drobo, the DroboShare, and the DroboPro. The DroboShare showed, if nothing else, that Data Robotics can NOT build a NAS (who in their right mind would ever consider basing a multi-terabyte NAS on an old Celphone CPU and barely enough RAM to run a basic OS?), and I have repeatedly lost multiple Terabytes of data on my DroboPro.

Amazing also that DroboPro managed to get VMWare Certified, when you can’t even remotely manage it when it is hooked up to your ESX server! If you put a DroboPro in a CoLocation facility with your ESX cluster, the only way you can ever know if there’s a disk problem is to put a webcam facing the front of the device so you can watch the lights remotely. No email alerts in a server configuration, no visibility to drive temperature, no visibility to fan speed or chassis temperature, no predictive failure analysis using S.M.A.R.T. info, no SNMP, no syslog, not even a web interface.

In the face of real-world stuff like this, I’ve been a little surprised at the universally positive press the Drobo is getting. This news is more what I’d expect from what I see of the Drobo in the real world.

That said, their BeyondRAID is still strangely compelling and I’d love to have it in the form of a BeyondRAID HBA that I could use in my own file servers.

By: Robin Harris

Robin Harris — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 21:24:39 +0000

You’re right. I only worked there for 14 years.

Persistent storage is the hardest part of computing.

Robin

By: natmaka

natmaka — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 21:21:15 +0000

Ken Ols_o_n? Ken Ols_e_n, AFAIK(?)