The decline of tape and rise of disk-based backup has been trending in the press a decade+, though only very recently has the worldwide market for backup appliances actually overtaken tape, wow! Drobo agrees with the movement, internally revenue from our business products overtook that of our professional products, in part because we help customers make the transition from tape to disk backup. IDC is behind the appliance news, and Storage Newsletter has a good summary of the data.
These days deduplication is the feature buyers look for in a backup appliance. What is interesting is that the same software that already works great with Drobo (e.g. Veeam or Symantec) provides dedup in a very affordable way. Dedup is not needed in the storage, and where Drobo storage shines as a backup appliance is our built-in Thin Provisioning. Thin Provisioning is arguably more important than dedup, particularly for SMBs or departments that can’t afford a backup appliance.
Thin Provisioning can save 50 – 70% of the up-front cost of disk storage used for backup. Smaller environments most likely already have Veeam or Symantec deployed and therefore have dedup at a low cost, completing the backup appliance solution. According to one of our customers with EMC Data Domain, “2.4TB to expand my backup was going to cost $30,000, and with Drobo I could get 80TB for less.” Check out the case study for more details.
Net = Drobo is great storage for a disk-based backup solution to replace tape for the majority of data you need to back up in companies both large and small. I’d like to hear about other ways you are doing disk-based backup with a purpose-built solution that is like an appliance without the “appliance.”
Talk live to Mario and other Drobo experts @ http://www.drobo.com/live or e-mail mario@drobo.com.
Mario Blandini
Mario is VP of Technology Solutions @ Drobo. Responsible for technical marketing, the pre-sales technical team, product marketing contribution, and solution development with industry partners, he is the voice of Drobo webcasts / podcasts and the pitch man in most Drobo videos. Talk live to Mario and other Drobo experts @ http://www.drobo.com/live, or e-mail mario@drobo.com.
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http://blog.drobo.com
Hi Mario,
I have a lot of friends that recommend Drobo, but I also have a lot of IT friends that recommend Synology as well. My company, is rather small and we’re looking for a better way to backup our data. We currently have 60TB of data that need to be backed up constantly – and tape backup is definitely not cutting it anymore! Before I propose Drobo as a backup solution to my boss I would like to know what Drobo has as compared to Synology. One advantage I see is simplicity, but I would like to know any other plus sides of Drobo.
Thanks,
Steve
Steve,
For sure, tape is not the right solution for 60TB, at least for your primary backup retention. It might still be helpful for doing offsite protect, but there are several solutions where disk can be as cost effective, but a whole lot more capable with a better possible SLA. Please let me know if I can help with recommendations on the end to end solution, or join us live one of 5 times we demo each day @ http://www.drobo.com/live.
I am glad that you have picked up on the simplicity difference, it is big. Some vendors will advertise having a subset of the capabilities of Drobo BeyondRAID, but with specific limitations. For backup, Thin Provisioning is a big different not available outside of Enterprise storage devices, and it allows you to provision a great deal today, but buy only what you need up front, for 50-70% the savings in many cases. Drobo also has a virtual hotspare for additional savings, 20-50% savings there depending on the configuration.
Drobo is also aligned very well with backup solutions for business, from our certification with Symantec to our upcoming solution launch with Acronis, to the hot promo we have running with Veeam (full details @ http://blog.drobo.com/?p=103). If you need more, I have 3 videos that compare Drobo with those other guys:
Faster than toasting a bagel – http://youtu.be/RzXiLIW7n8A
Easy enough for a 9yr old – http://youtu.be/7l1lVfTvewY
Fast and easy, no grooming – http://youtu.be/jNI6cPJ9M58
You can see quite clearly that Drobo is different. Thanks for the comment, keeping it short for now, contact me @ mario@drobo.com any time.