BlueArc and Drobo founder Geoff Barrall has a new perch: Gridstore, one of the companies I’ve been following for almost 3 years. Geoff is the new executive chairman. Formal announcement is expected this week.

Gridstore’s concept is a low-cost scale-out NAS appliance designed for office environments. Each box is a small, low-power node with a couple of TB. Stack ‘em for as much redundancy, capacity and performance you want.

Think of it as the consumerization of hyper-scale technology. Nutanix writ small.

Gridstore details
Gridstore is offering a low-cost, scale-out network file server for $500 a node. That is too cheap for the enterprise storage companies to sell directly.

Founded 5 years ago, Gridstore got a beta out in 2010, and have been shipping for well over a year. They are a Microsoft CIFS protocol file server, using Microsoft’s storage server software. Running on small, 25 watt Atom-based boxes, a 6 node configuration is the size of a bread box.


Like other scale-out NAS systems, the Gridstore NAS has no single point of failure and can survive multiple node failures without going down or losing data.

They call their redundancy scheme RAIDg. When you set up a volume you dial in how many faults you want to survive and the software handles the rest.

Today the number of faults they can handle is limited to half the number of nodes minus one. If you have a 6 node configuration it can handle the loss of 2 nodes. They expect to relax that requirement in the future.

The StorageMojo take
Haven’t spoken to Geoff about this, but Gridstore seems like a natural for him. If there’s a theme to his many endeavors, its making advanced NAS technology more accessible.

Gridstore fits the bill nicely. If there’s one complaint about Drobo, its the lack of box-level redundancy. Gridstore answers this objection, at a higher price point.

Drobo – over 200,000 units sold – has blazed a trail for bringing advanced storage technology to the masses at affordable prices. They may be the first, but as Gridstore and others demonstrate, they won’t be the last.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Hoping to make it to CES later this week. Readers: anyone I should make a point to see?

Several readers have written in lately with roughly the same question: what’s the best way to build cheap home bulk storage?

Here’s how 1 writer put it:

I was hoping you could provide me with some advice. I have so many external drives that I have to swap. I have almost 10 Terabytes of data – mostly movies that I would like to consolidate into one “volume”. I was thinking about building a 5-bay JBOD Raid (a cheap enclosure) and was also thinking of using MacZFS to handle the storage pool part.

Price is important. Performance isn’t.

How would readers propose to do this on their favorite OS? The folks asking this question aren’t full time sysadmins – they already have their ideas – so let’s not get too esoteric.

The StorageMojo take
This question has been vexing me as well. I have a small Thunderbolt array – a Promise Pegasus R4 – hooked up to a new iMac for video editing. I’d like to reconfigure it from RAID 5 to multiple RAID 0 stripes for speed and capacity. The question is how to back up those vulnerable RAID 0 partitions.

It’s looking like large FireWire drives are the right answer. But maybe you have a better one.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

I sat down with Nimble Storage co-founder and VP of engineering Varun Mehta to discuss their architecture – and shoot some video. Varun has been part of several Valley success stories – NetApp, Sun, Data Domain – and has a first hand perspective on disruptive technologies.

Varun and co-founder Umesh Maheshwari – a brilliant architect and a very nice guy – designed the Nimble product that he discusses. Take 4 minutes to learn more about Innovations in Storage Architecture at Nimble Storage:

Or you can see it in HD on YouTube.

The StorageMojo take
The Nimble guys have great technology, but they’ve also put together a compelling value proposition: collapse 3 time-consuming and complex workflows – primary storage, backup and archiving – into 1 appliance. Include all the needed software, price it well, target under-served mid-sized companies and you have a recipe for another Valley success.

The tech trends they’re riding will only get better. But the business trends are in their favor as well. SMB’s today have many TB of data and little staff to manage it – or capital to invest. With Congress ensuring that America operates well below capacity for years to come, the times favor thrifty solutions like Nimble’s.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.
Nimble bought my time for this video, but I made all editorial decisions.

I was surprised by the number of questions at last week’s webinar – many more than we could get to – so I’m answering a few here.

Performance
Q: Can Robin talk about performance and how does flash help solve I/O bottleneck?

NAND flash is very good at random reads, and a good SSD can handle thousands per second, compared to a disk drive’s 150-500 (for a high-end drive). That’s one reason arrays are popular: they provide higher random I/O performance because multiple heads are seeking. But that’s also why capacity utilization is so low: the disks come with more capacity than most applications use.

So not only are you buying multiples of the most expensive disks, but then you only use a fraction of their capacity. This is why flash SSDs are predicted to kill the high-end drives even though SSDs cost much more per GB: a single SSD can eliminate 6-10 hard drives. That is a major cost saving.

Q: So the low cost assumes that the cache is read only, otherwise it needs to be RAID? That comes off as misleading.

While flash SSDs are much better at random reads than they are random writes, they still beat several high-end disks at writes.

Since most workloads are 80%-95% reads, an SSD that can handle 1,000 writes per second can handle a lot of work. Disks are still the most cost-effective solution for large sequential workloads because their performance is close to SSDs and they are so much cheaper.

Reliability
Q: What are Robin’s thoughts on the reliability of SSDs? We have seen failure rates of over 10% on drives less than two months old.

Flash SSD reliability today is all over the map. As flash SSD technology matures, I’d expect to see drive reliability rates converge. 5 years ago disk reliability was fairly similar with the glaring exception of Maxtor.

That said, it’s useful to recognize that there’s a lot more design and sourcing variability in SSDs. If someone uses the cheapest parts – and there are plenty available – they can offer good specs but highly variable reliability.

If they leave out too much redundancy they’ll have a cost advantage but will be more vulnerable to chip and plane failures. The market will eventually settle on similar specs for each application, but we’re years away from that.

Q: You mentioned 10,000 writes and failure can begin, what is that in years?

Like so many storage specs, that 10k write spec for MLC flash is a statistical one that can be improved upon by more robust ECC, as this chart from SNIA shows:

But the most important way to improve upon it is by increasing the capacity of the SSD. Double the size of the SSD and you double the total write capacity.

As to what that is in years, the industry is still figuring out how to spec that. The best vendor spec I’ve seen so far has been from Intel – 5 years at 20 GB of writes per day.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. I enjoyed the webinar – a new experience for me – and not just because I got paid. The crew at Nimble was a pleasure to work with. Here’s a link to the webinar.

JIm Gray’s comment that disk is the new tape is truer today than it was 8 years ago. We’ve been adding caches, striping disks, modifying applications and performing other unnatural acts to both reduce and accommodate random reads and writes to disk.

Flash changes the calculus of 20 years of storage engineering. Flash gives us abundant random reads – something hard drives are poor at – and reasonable random writes to whatever hot data we choose.

In a feverish burst of design and investment we’ve tried flash everywhere in the storage stack: disks; PCI cards; motherboards; controllers; built-in tiering; and appliances. These products have been focused on enterprise datacenters or very targeted applications where the cost of flash was justifiable.

But clarity is emerging. It isn’t so much where you put the flash as what you ask the flash to do. There are three requirements:

• Valuable data. Flash is an order of magnitude more costly than disk.
• Often accessed. If not, leave it on disk.
• Enables new functionality and/or lowers cost. If it doesn’t, why bother?

The buyer’s burden
These requirements frame a basic point: optimizing for flash requires a systems level approach. Adding flash can make current architectures go faster, but that isn’t the big win.

Buyers looking for an economic edge must make a cognitive leap: the old ways are no longer best. Flash enables efficiencies and capabilities in smaller systems that only costly enterprise gear had a few years ago.

Tiering
Tiered flash solutions are the most common approach today. Tiering software has improved in recent years, making the movement of data between flash and disk safe, fast and granular.

We’ve started to at least see interest in the midsize enterprise, like the EqualLogic hybrid SAS/SSD array in VDI deployments.

Metadata and cache
The best fit for flash today is metadata and caching. These best meet the requirements for value, access and functionality.

Once metadata is freed from disk constraints we can combine it with caching to build high-performance systems on commodity hardware. The win for innovators is to design new metadata structures and caching algorithms for flash.

They can design the (write) data layouts to best take advantage of the physics of disk and flash, such as with Nimble Storage’s CASL architecture, which combines a large flash cache with full-stripe writes, is one example.

Flash is also an important enabler for low-cost de-duplication because it’s cheaper to keep block metadata – fingerprints or hash codes – in flash than it is in RAM. Some vendors are encouraging the use of de-duplicated storage for midrange primary storage, enabled by flash indexes or caches that make it feasible to reconstruct files on-the-fly.

The StorageMojo take
Shaking off the effects of 50 years of disk-based limitations isn’t easy. Our disk-based orthodoxy is ingrained in architectures and our thinking.

But buyers face a difficult job: evaluating architectures and algorithms to choose products for eval. A shortcut: look for architectures that collapse existing storage stovepipes to reduce cost, total data stored and operational complexity. The three are related and offer the big wins.

In the last 10 years raw disk capacity cost has dropped to less than a 10th of what they were, but the cost of traditional storage systems haven’t. The culprits: operating costs; storage network infrastructure costs; and capacity requirements that have risen faster than management productivity.

The flood of data continues to rise, but cost and complexity doesn’t have to rise with it. We can – and are – doing better.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. I’ve been working with Nimble Storage lately and like what they’ve done.

Forget the flame wars over moving window versus fixed block de-duplication. A recent paper, A Study of Practical Deduplication (pdf) from William J. Bolosky of Microsoft Research and Dutch T. Meyer of the University of British Columbia found that whole file deduplication achieves about 75% of the space savings of the most aggressive block level de-dup for live filesystems and 87% of the savings for backup images.

Presented at FAST 11 – and winner of a “Best Paper” award – the researchers looked at file systems from 857 Microsoft desktop computers over 4 weeks. Researchers asked permission to install rather invasive scanning software.

The scanner took a snapshot using Window’s volume shadow copy service and then recorded metadata about the file system itself. The scanner recorded each file’s metadata, retrieval and allocation pointers as well as the computer’s hardware and systems configuration. They excluded the pagefile, hibernation file, the scanner itself and the VSS snapshots the scanner created.


During scanning each file was broken into chunks using both fixed block or Rabin fingerprinting. They also identified whole file duplicates.

Rabin uses dynamically variable block sizes to maximize compression. Figuring out where to break the file adds to the overhead.

The resulting data set was 4.1 TB compressed – too large to import into a database – and was further groomed to lose unneeded data.

De-dup issues
De-duplication is expensive. You’re giving up direct access to the data to save capacity.

The expense is in I/Os and CPU cycles. Comparing each chunk’s fingerprint to all other chunks is nontrivial. De-duplication indirection adds to I/O latency. A file’s chunks are scattered around, requiring small and expensive random I/O’s to read.

Older techniques, such as sparse files and Single Instance Storage, are more economical even if their compression ratios aren’t as high. Fewer CPU cycles, less indirection and good compression.

The StorageMojo take
If capacity is expensive – read “enterprise” – and I/Os cheap – SSD or NVRAM in the mix – fancy dedup can make sense. It is at the margin of capacity cost and I/O availability that the value prop gets dicey.

Low duty cycle storage – SOHO – with plenty of excess CPU and light transactions could use deduped primary storage. But with a 10 TB of data to backup, most users would’t notice the difference between whole file and 8KB Rabin.

It’s the price tag and user reviews the SOHO/SMB crowd will be looking at.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. The paper also included some interesting historical data about Windows file system that I covered on ZDNet.

This came in over the transom from a semiconductor engineer. He’s wants home archive storage and is wondering why no one seems to sell it. I’ve been grappling with the same issue.

Here’s an edited-for-length excerpt from his letter:

I use RAID server products from Netgear and QNAP and have been searching for my ideal server product. I don’t understand why it doesn’t exist. My hunt is for a server with integrated error checking to ensure that bit errors can be caught and rectified. My goal is a system that secures the integrity of the files stored upon it. As far as I am aware this kind of functionality does not exist and isn’t discussed anywhere.

For example, once I have a video file (which can be the result of many hours of editing) it isn’t subsequently modified, just read on occasion as required. I don’t want any bit errors on this file – every change is just a corruption. I backup my files, I just want to make sure that what I am backing up is the same as when it was first written.

I don’t want to run a piece of software over the network, I want the server to run a check and fix any errors that it finds. It is something that I would gladly pay a premium for. I think there is a market for this as there must be a lot of users who have files that never change.

Frustrated in California

Dear Frustrated
You’ve identified the key problem: RAID systems aren’t for archives. RAID keeps your data available after a disk failure – sometimes 2 disk failures – but they do not ensure long-term data integrity. Or even short-term integrity. Not their thing.

This is what archives – traditionally tape – are for.

But tape is a tough sell to the home & SOHO market. Low-end drives – DAT, SVR, VXA – cost several hundred dollars plus the tapes. DLT/LTO drives start around $1200 with $40 tapes.

You can buy an external Blu-ray burner for those prices and 50 GB media for a few bucks each. On sale BR media is starting to reach the 5¢/GB level of 2 TB drives, and the longevity should be better.

But I have over 500 GB of video alone. Shuffling 10 or more BR media – 20 if I’m paranoid – reminds me of floppy backups. Yuck.

The current plan:

1. Create zip archives of files and folders I want to preserve.
2. Back them up to 2 local hard drives.
3. And ship them off to my online backup provider.

What I don’t know is how robust zip archives are. There is a 32-bit CRC, but what does that do for a 10 GB folder of PDFs?

Also, I wonder about the advisability of zipping compressed formats such video and audio files. It might be worth the computational overhead and the possible larger files if the zip file is robust.

The StorageMojo take
Frustrated isn’t the first home user to want an archive and he won’t be the last. Hundreds of millions of home users will see the need over the next decade.

The question is whether or not someone can design a commercially viable system for home and SOHO use. It is obvious that drive vendors have the cost advantage, especially with the advent of easy and cheap USB drive docks, if they build a disk drive designed for that purpose.

An archive drive can be slower – 4200 or even 3600 RPM – and less dense. Optimized for large transfers. Slower, cheaper actuators and drive electronics.

Single platter 2.5″ 7mm drives could be the sweet spot: minimal head cost; slim cartridge-like form factor; and much faster than optical. Then it is just a matter of getting the volumes up and the costs down.

But that’s just one idea. Please comment on how you would solve the home and SOHO archive problem.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

A reader writes:

I found your blog after searching for storage alternatives. I have to say, its really impressive and has helped me a lot so far. I was wondering if you could offer some advice.

We run an online version control service. Currently we are hosted on a VMware environment using FC SAN (SAS and SATA).

We’re growing into the 3 TB+ range and looking for alternatives, since we’re paying $2.50/GB for FC SAN (crazy). We looked at NetApp, but with all the stuff going on these days I have to think there is something less expensive and more creative.

Basically, our needs are:

• Fast read and write performance (500+ r/w iops – we have over 13,000 commits per day)
• Shared across many machines. We are currently using NFS.
• Something that won’t require a team to manage. Although, we already manage our entire Linux environment.

I noticed a post about Gluster, ParaScale, and Nexenta. They look promising, but my fear is that they will require too much maintenance. SAN and NFS are pretty simple and if we get NetApp from our hosting provider they manage it for us. Although, they want to charge us $8,000/mo for it (two shelf, 28 450 GB 15k SAS).

As I dive into storage I think I get more confused Any advice is greatly appreciated.

When I asked if I could publish the note – which has been edited for clarity and anonymity – I had my own questions:

Why do you think that Gluster, ParaScale & Nexenta will require too much maintenance? Also, when you say SAN, are you referring to Fibre Channel or simply a dedicated Ethernet storage network?

The reply illustrated a facet of the marketing problem that new technologies face: uncertainty.

Not sure really, I just have not had experience with any of those solutions yet. Nexenta looks pretty impressive. I’ve also heard some great results from DRBD.

We have Fiber Channel with HBA cards. It’s still shared storage, but really fast.

BTW, DRBD is the name of an open-source software product:

DRBD® refers to block devices designed as a building block to form high availability (HA) clusters. This is done by mirroring a whole block device via an assigned network. DRBD can be understood as network based raid-1.

The StorageMojo take
My first thought is that anyone who manages a technical hosted service that costs several $K per month should be able to manage a fairly modest scale-out cluster whose capital cost may be only 2-3 months of rental. And 28 15k drives seems like overkill on both the IOPS and the capacity.

But I don’t know much about version control I/O profiles. Maybe the problem is harder than that.

Readers, what say you?

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

I noticed this morning that co-founder Geoff Barrall is out as Data Robotics CEO. The VCs installed their own guy, who previously was head of sales and marketing at on-the-ropes Brocade.

Given Geoff’s banishment from the executive team and the lack of a “time to take DR to the next level” quote from him, it looks like he didn’t go willingly. Update: Geoff’s name is back on the executive team web page as of Thursday the 18th. I hope he and the company can figure out a role for him. Of course, if they don’t we may get an even more innovative company. End update.

I’ve asked a couple of those involved to comment and I’ll update this post if and when I hear anything more. My impression could be wrong.

The StorageMojo take
Founders can be an irreplaceable asset in building a company for the long term. But not all of them can be a Ken Olsen, taking a company from a $70k investment to over $14B in sales in 30 years of growth.

Yet even if they aren’t executive timber for the long haul, they can be valuable for a fast growing company, giving newcomers a cultural template and old-timers a touchstone in the midst of often mind-numbing change.

Like Dave Hitz at NetApp, Geoff seemed to be a great ambassador for the company and might have been a continuing asset – if the VCs wanted to build a major company. But given the sad state of the IPO market it appears DR is being groomed for acquisition – a decision Geoff might not have agreed with.

But when you take VC money you also, usually, give up control of your fate. It’s the Golden Rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. On an unrelated note the RSS feed should be working. Safari’s View Source option doesn’t show every character that Firefox does. Huh?

Geoff Barrall founded BlueArc at the high end of NAS performance. He then founded Data Robotics, maker of the Drobo low end arrays. A group of bloggers visited DR last month and a lucky few – not including me – took brand new Drobo2 units home.

The idea
For those who haven’t been following Drobo, the idea was to build a simple-as-possible-but-no-simpler storage array for data intensive civilians. Folks like photographers, videographers, musicians, scientists and designers who munge a lot of data.

Drobo users can put any size drive in the box and the capacity will be added automagically. The usable capacity for protected data is roughly the sum of the 3 smallest drives in the box.

The key point though is that civilians don’t have to know about volume sizes, drive capacities or configuring RAID. Stick a couple of drives in the box and Drobo tells you what you’ve got.

Need more, add another drive. Once the slots are filled, pull the smallest drive out and add a larger drive. Don’t get too frisky though: with large drives the data movement takes many hours.

The instruction manual is printed on the inside of the faceplate that covers the drives. Big green and red lights give drive status.

Product line
Data access and performance are 2 sides of the same coin. If the performance is too slow for the application, the data is essentially not available – at least until you can move it to something faster.

The gen1 Drobo was USB only and crippled by anemic performance. Fine for photographs, but any decent-sized video file would choke it.

The second Drobo – now the low end model – added FireWire 800 to the mix. You could archive video on it, but not edit it in situ. About a year ago they introduced a 8 drive version with GigE and single-server iSCSI support and a dual-drive failure protection.

Last month Drobo added 2 new models: the Drobo S with 5 drives and eSATA; and the Drobo Elite, an 8 drive unit with dual GigE and multi-server iSCSI support. The latter is spec’d at 255 virtual LUNs, but ~100 is more realistic.

Performance
Now fellow blogger Devang Panchigar over at StorageNerve has published performance test results (pdf) of the current low-end model.

The net/net: USB tops out at about 32 MB/sec; while FW800 manages 52 MB/sec. Neither is fast enough for HD video, but FW800 will handle standard def video just fine.

I’m planning to buy a 5 slot Drobo S later this month with the help of a gift discount coupon from DR. After I’ve played with it I’ll let you know what I think. One problem already: getting a decent Mac eSATA driver for a PCIe card.

The StorageMojo take
DR is moving up market. They plan to stay with a self-imposed $15k price ceiling. With 3 TB drives right around the corner, a raw 24 TB iSCSI SAN array could come in at $8k or less.

$300/TB for a capacity large enough for many SMBs is disruptive – especially when the easy-enough-for-mom management is factored in. If they go public next year I suspect there will be a bidding war for them in ’11.

At $400 for an empty 4 slot box they aren’t competing on price either. They are showing the industry what can be done with a premium price – compared to the Buffalos and Iomegas – array that offers much greater ease of use. Their growth rate proves that is a popular message.

The bigger issue for old-line vendors is that the SMB market is about to get a lot tougher – as if it wasn’t tough enough. The enterprise ROBO market is also in play.

DR is the one to beat in the prosumer storage market.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. DR was a sponsor of the tech blogger excursion that flew me to Silicon Valley. And just for the record, Drobo doesn’t use ZFS.

These requests came in over the transom in the last couple of days. Maybe some StorageMojo readers have wisdom to share.

I have a question I hope you can help me with. My boss asked me . . . to research HP Left-hand SANs and Dell Equallogic SANs. Do you have any special knowledge of these products and, if so, would you make an informal recommendation?

What say you, StorageMojo readers? If you evaluated both, why did you make the choice you did? Vendors welcome to comment, but please identify yourself as such.

The StorageMojo take
AFAIK, both products are good iSCSI systems. Both are backed by major corporations. EqualLogic may be stronger in the channel today, but HP has channel chops as well. HP’s blade servers may be a more expandable platform, but EqualLogic’s software portfolio may be more affordable.

Translation: you could do worse than either of these.

Part II
Another customer perplexity: service.

We have a pair of HP disk arrays, EVA 8000 and 6000 and I am looking for a consultant to help up with storage planning. Do you do such work or could you recommend someone to me. I am looking for someone who goes beyond just being a seller, I have plenty of potential sellers already.

The writer is in a small city in the Mountain West, so you should be used to working remotely with clients. No, not in Arizona.

The StorageMojo take
HP folks may be wondering: why doesn’t he call HP? My guess: not big enough for a direct engagement.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

With all the kerfluffle, one might think that Data Domain is the only dedup appliance company out there.

They aren’t.

The big guys are admitting they don’t have a product
Bill Andrews, CEO of ExaGrid, weighed in with some pertinent comments today:

What does it mean to ExaGrid if EMC buys Data Domain?

First, it validates what we have been saying — that NTAP and EMC did not have a product for the mid market to small enterprise. If they had a competitive product why would they pay this much? They certainly don’t need the brand, customers, market or sales force. It proves they had a hole in their product lines.

ExaGrid is out there competing every day and we see what customers are doing at the street level.

ExaGrid
- Wins against Data Domain over 70% of the time in head to head battles
- ExaGrid has over 350 customers
- In Q1 Data Domain brought on 218 new customers and ExaGrid brought on 51 . . . not bad considering their sales force is 4 times the size of our entire company
- ExaGrid has over 110 customer success stories on its web site where the company is named and the IT person is named and quoted
o This is more than all the de-dupe vendors combined . . .

Bill goes on to point out that there is a market for both backup software with dedup and for target appliances. The latter appeals to the SMB, who is just coming to grips with the growing requirements for e-discovery and the advantages of D2D backup.

The StorageMojo take
There’s little doubt that if the IPO market were stronger ExaGrid would have gone public and used the money to turbocharge their sales and marketing. Then they’d be commanding a billion dollar offer as well.

Bill’s point about the hole in EMC’s and NetApp’s product lines is well taken. Everybody talks about SMB, but unless you focus on them it is very hard to get it right. Enterprise margins and engineering challenges are just too appealing. SMB customers want a strong relationship and that takes time.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. I just ripped Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon to my iPhone. Hence the post’s title. Update: I did some work for ExaGrid a couple of years ago. End update.

Direct attached storage may catch on
PCI-e DAS is getting traction in the media world. At least a dozen vendors – all smaller – were showing it, and customers were responding.

JMR’s BlueStor is promising over 4 GB/sec with PCI-e attach. In a world where a single 4k frame is almost 50 MB, that is speed production companies need.

More on NAB later.

The StorageMojo take
Beth Pariseau noted the DAS movement at SNW earlier this month. This isn’t just a Hollywood moment. There’s more to this nascent DAS resurgence than the need for speed.

• Multi-core systems. Multi-core, multi-thread systems are like a cluster in a box – only cheaper. DAS looks like a SAN to an 8 core system.
• Management. When you can easily attach several dozen TB of cheap SATA to a physical machine, who needs a SAN? Not to mention the optical PCI-e extension cables.
• Cost. There’s something that looks a lot like worldwide depression going down. DAS is cheap(er) and as long as systems scale inside the box a SAN offers few advantages.

A DAS resurgence. Will wonders never cease.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

A few weeks after NetApp shut down their low-end StoreVault product, Data Robotics introduces a low-end box that will be very popular with small and some medium sized businesses: the DroboPro. Hey, it’s even got a rack mount kit.

Supporting USB, FireWire and now GigE iSCSI, the almost management-free DroboPro is a product that direct enterprise sales forces can’t sell: it doesn’t cost enough. And neither, evidently, did the StoreVault.

Here’s a one minute video of the product showing a 3 drive configuration handling a 2 drive failure:

The StorageMojo take
That sucking sound you hear is the under $25k array market draining into Drobo’s coffers. They won’t be missed.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.