A month since my last post, though the blog site has seen lots of other great posts from Tom & Erik @ Drobo. What have I been up to? Answering a lot of live chat about the new Drobo products plus double the number from folks interested in chatting about Drobo business products. More live chat has lead to more live demos of Drobo for Business solutions, join a live demo in our expanded format and see the math for yourself.
I’ve also been working on tools to help business audiences understand how Drobo compares to other SMB and mid-range SAN products they are considering. The inspiration for the new interactive tool? Total c
ereal. It hit shelves in 1961 with the slogan “One Bowl, 100%”, and if you’re too young to remember the commercials, YouTube is great for a blast from the past. The commercials pointed out to shocked breakfasters that they would have to eat many, many bowls of another cereal to equal the nutrition in one bowl of Total.
Yesterday Tom introduced you to the simple calculator that shows how much equipment you need based on your target capacity and performance. Feel free to stop reading and go check it out right now!
This is a big thing because with classic SMB storage, many hard drive spindles are needed to build-up sufficient IOPS (Input Output Operations per Second) for the performance you need. IOPS is the most important performance metric in SANs that support applications and mixes workloads in a virtualized environment. Drobo B1200i with SSDs & tiering gives you both capacity and performance, something you cannot get with other systems in a similar price range. The result: you always need fewer Drobos to give you the same capacity and performance value as several chassis of other SMB storage.
Net = Most people consider math to be hard—our Let’s Do The Math tool for Drobo B1200i makes the math easy. So although SAN storage is considered difficult to set up, manage, and use, Drobo SAN storage is easy. The numbers don’t lie, Drobo B1200i is ready for real workloads and validated as such by ESG and in other product reviews and it is more affordable. Is there another product you want to see in the tool? Let me know, and as long as I can find a price on the Internet, it can be in the tool in a matter of minutes … in almost the same time as it takes to set up a Drobo!
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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