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Considering DroboElite BeyondRaid iSCSI Storage For VMware Environments

December 6th, 2009 |

Author: Rich Brambley

Drobos Screenshot Surely you’ve heard about Drobo by now? As the presenter in the last slot of the GetsaltIT Tech Field Day (TFD) schedule a few weeks ago, Data Robotics was probably the most anticipated session by my fellow Delegates. I’ll admit, I had heard enough about the technology during the 2 day event that I was looking forward to the presentation as well. Data Robotics did not disappoint. Evidence can be seen in the enthusiasm expressed in the various posts and videos published since that session.

As always, I’ll leave the deep technical details of Drobo’s unique and patented Drobo BeyondRaid technology to my fellow storage bloggers and stay focused on how Data Robotics fits in virtual infrastructure. In this post I expand a little on why the Drobo storage device is a VMware HCL certified, simple to implement and expand iSCSI SAN targeted for SMB customers that is an exciting alternative. Finally I offer opinions based primarily on my virtualization server administrator perspective.

Data Robotics and Drobo Product Overview
The company started with the basic Drobo product: a 4 SATA drive bay desktop storage device that’s primary use case is marketed as ideal for large photo collections or archiving and protecting other similar data. Home users or small business users can easily insert the drives and attached a Drobo to a Mac or Windows PC via USB or Firewire. Within minutes a redundant storage repository can be configured by a 12 year old boy (for example) without any technical expertise. Drobo then introduced the DroboPro, an 8 disk bay device targeted for SMBs. Designed as a single host storage solution, DroboPro added a single ethernet port and iSCSI capability to it’s connection options. Cali Lewis even featured the DroboPro in episode #593 of her popular GeekBrief.TV video podcasts.

Data Robotics told us during their TFD presentation that to date they had about 80,000 customers. I mention the BeyondRaid technology later in this post, but I’m sure a lot of these customers were intrigued by the cost of the device and not just the technology. As mentioned on a previous Infosmack podcast hosted by Greg Knieriemen, a DroboPro with 16 TB of usable disk storage can be purchased for roughly $4000! That cost and capacity is based on the current cost of 2 TB SATA drives – the largest capacity available today. Check out the Infosmack TFD wrap up episode as well for more comments from attendees on Drobo.

It should be mentioned that Data Robotics was surprised that a healthy percentage of those customers began using Drobo for ESX storage before Data Robotics knew about it. That discovery lead them to get the VMware HCL certification.

DroboElite released
On 11/23 Data Robotics introduced 2 new products, the DroboElite and DroboS. DroboElite is aimed squarely for the SMB datacenter and improves the DroboPro’s prevision data center shortcomings. With dual ethernet ports and official support for up to 16 ESX hosts in a cluster, the DroboElite is obviously engineered to maximize it’s role as a ISCSI SAN option for ESX Clusters.

TFD organizer and Microsoft Storage MVP Stephen Foskett states it best in one of his posts:

“… DroboElite delivers nearly everything a small business could want from a computer closet storage device. It is a real honest-to-goodness iSCSI SAN array, supporting multiple servers and sporting dual gigabit Ethernet ports and dual-drive data protection.”

The press release linked above also provides the following virtualization related info:

“Tested VMware-ready Features – With dual iSCSI ports and the ability to create up to 255 Smart Volumes, DroboElite can support growing VMware environments and advanced VMware functionality including VMotion, Storage VMotion, snapshots, and high availability.”

BeyondRaid Overview
Data Robotic’s BeyondRaid eliminates provisioning arrays and fully utilizes total disk capacity even when used with a different size disks in the bays. For example, a Drobo storage device can have 2TB, 1TB, 500GB, 300GB, and 250GB SATA drives (or any combination of sizes for up to 8 SATA drives simultaneously) without limiting the data distribution to the smallest drive size. Furthermore, the drives can be any commodity SATA drives (buy them from where ever you want!) and can be added and removed while Drobo is powered on (up to 2 drives at a time with DroboElite). Best of all, you can remove the smallest drive and replace it with a larger one and increase the total disk capacity – all while the Drobo is serving live data! This means as SATA disk capacity and performance increases in the future, the total capacity and performance of a Drobo will do the same. Simply remove the old disks and replace with new disks on your own schedule.

At Tech Field Day we witnessed first hand the ease of creating Drobo storage volumes in the hands on labs. We were freely able to remove and insert SATA drives. Simplicity is an understatement in this process. Any non-technical employee could monitor and easily handle administration of the Drobo products. Watch the various videos linked in this post to see what I mean.

My Virtualization Admin Opinions
Data Robotics’ BeyondRaid is an exciting technology. it seems to be the perfect mix of ease to administer, redundancy, self healing, and self optimization. The announcement of the DroboElite product and the VMware HCL status legitimizes Data Robotics’ devices as a VMware storage option at an incredible price.

VMware customers with 16 or less ESX hosts probably can’t find as much storage for so little cost. I’m not usually focused on price so leave me comments for other options in the >10 TB usable disk for less than $5k category. I definitely want to know about those!

When considering alternatives to Drobo based on price, can you even buy a feature comparable server that could be used as an iSCSI target? Even if you can you will have to install an OS. There are cheap and free operating systems to serve iSCSI storage, but what about administering the hardware, drivers, firmware, etc when buying a server. Drobo still seems to be the best option to minimize the total cost of storage implementation and ownership.

Unfortunately there is only one power supply on all models of the Drobo. Hopefully this is on the short term roadmap. I do not recall being told as much, but I don’t recall anyone asking either. One power supply makes sense for the Drobo on the desktop, but in a rack in the data center redundant power is a must have for production deployments.

Today DroboElite seems to be a perfect fit for Dev/Test Labs. Perhaps even remote branch office scenario where a field engineer is not normally present.

It will be interesting to see if Drobo evolves their product line for enterprise customers or if an enterprise storage vendor acquires Data Robotics for integrating the BeyondRaid technology in their product lines.

If your curious about performance, fellow GestaltIT author and co Delegate at Tech Field Day, Devang Panchigar posted some basic testing results.

updated 12.06.09 – Chris Evans, another TFD delegate, posted about his experience implementing the DroboPro. Chris expresses the same concern about a single power supply as well as some other interesting quirks when deploying as an iSCSI SAN. Note that Evans’ post is not about the new, DroboElite, however. Check out the comments for a lengthy reply from Brad Meyer, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Data Robotics, Inc.

Disclosure: I received a vest/jacket and a certificate to purchase products at a discount from Data Robotics while at Tech Field Day. I have not purchased a Drobo as of this writing.

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Considering DroboElite BeyondRaid iSCSI Storage For VMware Environments

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