How do you shop for and buy significant items? For technical people, there is inevitably a strong research component. Wikipedia defines a review as “an evaluation of a piece of hardware like a car, home appliance, or computer.” My bet is that if you’re reading this, you’re the type of person who reads detailed independent reviews before buying any of these things. And in science, review articles provide a synthesis of research on a topic at that moment in time.
For the latest review of Drobo B1200i, that moment in time came with firmware release version 1.1.1, and the impact of SSDs working hand in hand with Data-Aware Tiering. This is is only the first part of more to come from the folks at StorageReview.com, which is amazing given the level of detail and analysis delivered in the first part. The charts & graphs really make it great, and I expect that many future Drobo customers will have used this review to help them size their deployment and choose whether to go SSD straight away or accelerate by adding SSDs later.
The results further validate the numbers behind the Drobo comparison calculator. While many classic reviews of Drobo cite relatively low performance for older generations of Drobo products for professionals, B1200i has proven performance. And in almost every review, classic or recent, ease-of-use is a constant. According to StorageReview.com, “The Drobo B1200i is the easiest to manage and deploy SAN we’ve tested … couple this simple usage model with the new auto tiering update and up to 6x throughput gains with SSDs and the B1200i’s value proposition keeps getting better.”
Net = Drobo B1200i has several reviews—4.5 of 5 stars, 9.0 of 10 rating, a lab validation for SMBs—and now this in-depth review with no specific score but information that folks who appreciate reviews want to hear. If you are in the market for SMB primary storage or larger disk-based backup, we think you should go ahead and buy a B1200i today, because just one will give you lots of capacity and performance, both!
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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