B1200i Archives -

Winner winner chicken dinner, and a Stevie!

Posted on September 18, 2012 by Mario Blandini • 0 Comments

I had chicken for dinner last night along with hundreds of others in a group setting, many of whom were winners. The origins of this poultry reference are not definitive. Some say it’s a phrase from skeet shooting in Minnesota, others say it’s a reference to a past $1.79 meal deal in Nevada. I like watching Guy Fieri’s shows on TV, and he uses the expression a lot, though this recipe is more of a tasty lunch than a dinner.

Just when you thought this blog post would be informal, quite the opposite. Last night I was fortunate enough to formally attend the 10th Annual American Business Awards New Products & Tech Awards presentation banquet. How lucky am I! It was an honor being there on behalf of my colleagues @Drobo, those who built the Drobo B1200i, which was being recognized. … Continue Reading

Blogging ain’t easy, but surveys are

Posted on September 18, 2012 by Mario Blandini • 0 Comments

Anyone can do it, right? Blog that is, all you need is an Internet connected device and an opinion. Since the beginning of this year I have 34 posts before this one for a respectable pace, though my pace has slowed considerably of late. Overcoming physics is not generally easy, which explains why I have not been able to figure out a way through some parasitic drag to maintain a brisk pace. No shortage of opinions, got Internet too, so it must be the presence of multiple activities in relative proximity contributing to some of my personal interference drag.

Someone who makes blogging look very easy also happens to be working with Drobo to host a live event later this week Friday 9/21: no PPT, several survey questions, lots of analysis and advice from Scott Lowe (@otherscottlowe). Everyone is welcome, and if you are a smaller shop (<250 users), we especially welcome your input! Participants will be entered to win a Drobo B800i iSCSI SAN system, providing you with >30TB of storage! It’s a $2,999 value and perfect for a virtualization lab at home (and your personal data and media . REGISTER NOW for the live chat.… Continue Reading

And the winner @ VMworld 2012 is … Jeff Stallworth

Posted on September 6, 2012 by Mario Blandini • 0 Comments

They flocked to the Drobo booth at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco. Over 1000 people took the Do The Math challenge for a chance to win an SSD acceleration for their B1200i or a free B800i array. Odds were much better than the lottery, one in thousands vs. one in millions, and the prize still great: $2,999 MSRP. The winner is Jeff Stallworth, IT Manager @ Auburn University. Congrats to Jeff!… Continue Reading

Why reviews are so important

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Mario Blandini • 0 Comments

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,… Continue Reading

The Calculator Age – Math made easy

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Mario Blandini • 0 Comments

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. … Continue Reading

Need both capacity and performance – DO THE MATH!

Posted on July 11, 2012 by Tom Buiocchi • 3 Comments

I think you may have heard us mention that over 70% of customers who buy Drobo for business also considered Dell and HP (PowerVault or EqualLogic, MSA or Lefthand, respectively). And you may have seen the customer feedback in terms of quantitative time and money savings on our customer page, with full details @ TechValidate.com.

Well, our flagship Drobo B1200i with SSDs and data-aware tiering is accentuating these savings even more – so much so that we put together an easy comparative tool making it is much easier to do the math (that’s what we do).

It turns out that other offerings can give you solid capacity OR good performance, but very few can deliver BOTH at the same time, at a reasonable price & configuration. And that’s precisely what our 1200i does. … Continue Reading

Is the tiering technology in the Drobo 5D and Drobo Mini the same as the B1200i?

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Erik Pounds • 5 Comments

This question came in from a blogger and we thought it was a pretty good question. There is a difference and it’s a long answer, but I’ll try and summarize.

We ship the B1200i with 3 SSDs, leaving the remainder of the drive bays available for HDDs. Because the B1200i is in “dual disk redundancy” mode by default, those SSDs are in a triple mirror, allowing you to lose two of them and still have access to your data. … Continue Reading

Validation for Drobo B1200i in real-world testing

Posted on June 11, 2012 by Mario Blandini • 0 Comments

Drobo is known as a cool company with cool storage. At events, countless folks stop by telling us they would love one for their house. And if they’re in IT, they soon realize that they also want it for work. For IT applications though, technology has to be more than cool. It has to work; and especially in SMB shops, they want to know it has been tested by a reliable third party. Working with ESG, we have a report with that validation. So, you can skip this blog and go straight to reading the report.… Continue Reading

Drobo B1200i = vSphere 5.0 certified = unique

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Mario Blandini • 0 Comments

The B1200i is not the first iSCSI SAN storage device certified, and products such as the Dell PS4100E or EMC VNXe, which SMBs consider when looking for innovative modern storage, have vSphere 5.0 certification. Drobo B1200i delivers Thin Provisioning just like those products, but it also provides automated tiering with SSDs that those products do not. Tiering with SSDs is exactly the capability SMBs need to support their VMware environment. With Drobo they get both capacity and performance at a price they can afford for a 100% certified solution. That’s what’s unique.… Continue Reading

Hyper-V is like Prego, it’s in there

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Mario Blandini • 1 Comment

With a very Italian name, you might wonder why I’m making reference to a bottled spaghetti sauce. I use it when it goes on sale, though I dramatically enhance it with two different meats, crimini mushrooms, and sweet onions, bolstered with stewed tomatoes and a can of paste, simmered with chili flakes and a kicker of sriracha sauce. Maybe if I used Prego it would already be “in there”, but the prep is still pretty easy,

The word “prego” is an Italian word that means “you are welcome.”… Continue Reading

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