Drobo B810i
Best in Class 8 Bay iSCSI SAN Array With Data-Aware Tiering

BeyondRAID:

What's BeyondRAID? Storage without limitations.

BeyondRAID technology, built into every Drobo, delivers all of the benefits of traditional RAID, while providing much more and leaving many of the limitations behind. This next-generation of redundant storage technology brings together enhanced protection, reliability, expandability, and ease-of-use.

Drobos, based on BeyondRAID, interact with computing systems in the same manner as storage arrays using traditional RAID, so installing a Drobo allows you to maintain your current operating system and file system. This eliminates the challenges and costs when moving to a new storage technology.

Problems with Traditional RAID

Developed in the 1980s, RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) was designed to pool disk drives together for increased capacity and reliability for data storage. It has been preventing single disk drive failures causing data loss, and has been used in almost every enterprise data center for decades.

While reliable, the complexity of RAID is a huge challenge for small businesses and consumers. RAID has a high learning curve with many options, levels, and unfamiliar terminology like striping, mirroring, and parity.

There are several primary challenges with traditional RAID:

• Lock-in of RAID Levels
  To change RAID levels, most storage arrays require the data to be moved off, reconfigured, and then moved back on. If you want to move to RAID 6 from RAID 5 for protection against two drive failures, you need to reinitialize and start over. This process could take days to complete.
• Lack of Expandability
  Once drives are configured into a RAID pool, expandability is impossible unless you have a lot of time, or experience. If you want to add more storage capacity, the solution is to create a new RAID pool, leaving you with another chunk of storage to manage - or you can just reinitialize and start over.
• Drive Failures Create Big Risks
  When a drive fails, most RAID implementations enter a state where data loss will occur if another drive falters before the user replaces the failed drive. Also, performance is hampered when in this debilitated state.

Moving Beyond RAID

Drobo's BeyondRAID technology solves the fundamental issues that traditional RAID can't. Built on the foundation of traditional RAID, BeyondRAID adds a layer of virtualization that chooses the correct protection algorithm based on data availability needs at any given moment. Since the technology works at the block level, it can write blocks of data that alternate between RAID protection levels.

If you need to add storage capacity to a Drobo, simply insert additional disk drives or replace the smallest disks with larger ones - no need to change RAID levels, purchase a new storage array, or go through the complex administration of pooling RAID groups.

The BeyondRAID feature can even switch from single to dual disk redundancy with just the click of your mouse through Drobo Dashboard. This ensures enterprise-level dual parity data protection, when needed. If a drive happens to fail, Drobo will automatically re-layout the data to the remaining drives, returning it to a protected state with no user interaction.

Available Features	RAID 1	RAID 5	RAID 6	Everyone Else with RAID	BeyondRAID
Supports Two Drives
Supports Three Drives
Support Four Drives or More
Single Disk Redundancy
Dual Disk Redundancy					1
Mixed Drive Utilization
Thin Provisioning				*
Instant Expansion
Smart Volumes					2
Mixed Drive Utilization
Automatic Protection Levels
Virtual Hot Spare
Data Aware
Drive Re-ordering

* Some vendors (e.g. Synology) offer some options, though they require manual choices / configuration.
¹ Available with 5-bay or Larger Drobos
² Available with iSCSI-capable Drobos

Thin Provisioning is a fundamental capability of BeyondRAID, allowing for infinite capacity expansion by just replacing a drive with a larger one.

Instant Expansion occurs when a new, or larger, drive is inserted without any disruption in service.

Drobo's volumes are Smart Volumes, pulling needed storage from a common pool and then returning deleted blocks back to the common pool, preventing free space from being tied up by any particular server.

Mixed Drive Utilization allows you to insert any drive, of any size, or any type, and Drobo will optimally use it - check out our interactive Capacity Calculator.

Automatic Protection Levels ensures the best algorithm is used to protect from drive failure depending on the number of drives that are inserted, without any user configuration. There is no need to learn about RAID levels or what mirroring or striping is.

Dual Disk Redundancy enhances BeyondRAID protection by guarding from multiple drive failures in a short period of time. Even if two drives fail, BeyondRAID will attempt to use the remaining drives to return to a protected state.

Virtual Hot Spare utilizes all drives at all time with no drives sitting idle waiting for one to fail. With some traditional RAID systems, a drive can be marked as a "hot spare", waiting on standby for a drive failure so it can take over. That's just a unutilized drive that you have to pay for taking up a valuable drive bay.

Drobos are Data Aware, intelligently handling data for added resiliency, performance, and management. Being Data Aware allows the Drobo to have a capacity gauge on the front, quickly recover in the event of a drive failure, enable intelligent tiering of data, and much more.

Drive Re-ordering allows Drobo disk packs to be moved to another Drobo, and even re-ordered, while still functioning - try that with RAID.

How BeyondRAID Works

Now that we've looked at how BeyondRAID compares with traditional RAID and the value that it brings, let's see how BeyondRAID works.

The sections of the RAID stack are drastically reinvented in a Drobo-and it all has to
do with how drives are pooled (disk pack) and the way data is stored (BeyondRAID virtualization).

Thin Provisioning with Smart Volumes

Our volumes are just smarter. Thin provisioning through Drobo's Smart Volumes provides on-demand allocation of storage providing maximized capacity utilization. Smart Volumes are a virtual volume architecture that pull needed storage, on-demand, from a common pool (thin provisioning) and then return any deleted blocks back to the common pool (thin reclamation), allocating these newly available blocks to free space immediately available for new data.

Space allocation is automatically managed, maximizing storage resources. For example, if a large file on a volume is deleted, the free space of the Drobo gets larger. The freed up space is then available to other volumes. Our Volumes are Smart, even enterprise-class arrays with thin provisioning do not return consumed storage back to a common pool at this granular level.

Build an iSCSI SAN with Drobo:

Whether you are building an SAN for the first time, scaling out an application, or implementing a server virtualization cluster, Drobo provides sophisticated yet easy-to-use networked storage for your IT environment. Utilizing the industry-standard iSCSI protocol, Drobo connects to your existing TCP/IP Ethernet network to consolidate storage and centrally share it with your servers.

What is iSCSI?

iSCSI (pronounced "i-scuzzy") is an Internet Protocol (IP)-based storage networking standard for connecting storage arrays to computers, using high performance Ethernet. iSCSI is an industry-standard protocol, allowing organizations to consolidate and centralize storage while providing servers with the illusion of locally-attached disks. Unlike traditional Fibre Channel storage, which requires special-purpose cabling, iSCSI can be run over the existing Ethernet network infrastructure.

iSCSI as Easy as USB for Windows and Mac

Drobo supports zero-click iSCSI connections on both Windows and Mac OS X. Once Drobo Dashboard is installed, access to the iSCSI storage over an Ethernet cable happens automatically. For Windows, Drobo Dashboard uses Microsoft's iSCSI software ("initiator"). As Mac OS X does not natively contain iSCSI support, Drobo Dashboard includes the necessary iSCSI software initiator for Mac OS X - free of charge.

iSCSI Deployment Scenarios

When building an iSCSI SAN with Drobo, there are a few network architectures you can use to ensure optimal performance and reliability for your applications.

Understanding iSCSI vs. NAS

There are important differences you should understand between iSCSI and network attached storage (NAS).

iSCSI is ideal for high volume data storage traffic and is designed to be a direct block-level protocol that reads and writes directly to the disk array. NAS-level protocols read and write at the file level, which means the disk array needs to perform more translation effort to actually access the blocks of data on the disk array.

In most scenarios, Drobo can be connected to your existing networking infrastructure. For the best performance in this configuration, it is recommended that you segment iSCSI traffic by creating a VLAN dedicated to that traffic. This will keep your high volume data storage traffic segmented from the rest of your LAN traffic. You can also attach multiple Drobo storage systems to one or more than one host via this same switch setup.

There are dozens of specific features that have been layered on top of the iSCSI protocol over the years. In other words, iSCSI can be a complex jungle, but you'll find deploying iSCSI with Drobo to be simple and straightforward. In fact, Drobo storage with Drobo Dashboard connect to your server with a single click of the mouse.

Data-Aware Tiering:

How do small and medium business (SMB) IT administrators effectively use solid state drives (SSDs) to accelerate their applications? They can't. Either the array is too expensive or the drives must be in their own pool and separate from the rest of the data. Data must be sent manually to the fast volume (SSD) or to the normal volume.

How can the IT administrator figure out what data is transactional in nature, that is, what data should be sent to the fast volume? To make things even more confusing and complicated, data can have mixed characteristics. But to get the most out of expensive SSDs, the solution must be intelligent and fully automatic-the data just needs to go to the right place automatically.

A Drobo is a single pool of drives by design. The user does not need to think about pooling drives or creating RAID groups. Also, drives of different sizes and types can be used in a Drobo. These advanced technologies make Drobos ideal for allowing SSDs and hard disk drives (HDDs) to work together optimally in the same chassis - automatically!

To enable use of drives of different sizes, the Drobo virtualization layer (see BeyondRAID section) sits on top of the physical drives. Because Drobos are data aware, data is placed intelligently in the best place on the drives. With the introduction of SSD support in the Drobo B1200i, SSDs provide a faster tier of storage for data that is transactional in nature, the type of data that benefits from the faster write and access speeds SSDs provide.

SSD Support

With the introduction of SSD support in the Drobo B1200i, SSDs provide a faster tier of storage for data that is transactional in nature, the type of data that benefits from the faster write and access speeds SSDs provide. As data enters the Drobo, if it is transactional, then the data is written to the "transactional" tier comprised of SSDs. If the data is a sequential stream, it is written to the “bulk tier” comprised of hard disk drives (HDDs). Unlike enterprise arrays with auto-tiering, transactional data goes directly to SSDs, which ensures that BOTH writes AND reads are optimized.

Being Data Aware

As data enters the Drobo, if it is transactional, then the data is written to the faster tier of SSDs. Unlike enterprise arrays with auto-tiering, transactional data goes directly to SSDs, which ensures that BOTH writes AND reads are optimized.

As data is being written to the Drobo, transactional data (shown in red) is written
to the faster tier and other data is written to the bulk tier.

Drobo's tiering functionality allows you to store any type of data on the Drobo and the data that can be optimized by SSDs is automatically optimized in flight. This means that all data-mixed data types from 10 or more VMs in a vSphere cluster, Exchange databases/datastores, backup data, or files on a file server-automatically goes to the right place.

One Pool, Multiple Tiers

As detailed in the BeyondRAID section, a Drobo is a single pool of drives. Whether you put three drives or 12 drives in a Drobo, they are all part of the same disk pack.

Two tiers of storage automatically configured in the same Drobo disk pack.

Whether you have 8 HDDs and 2 SSDs or 9 HDDs and 3 SSDs, they will be utilized appropriately without any upfront setup. All the administrator has to do is put the drives in the Drobo.

Fully Automated Tuning

After data is written to storage, data patterns often change. Sometimes a large amount of data is written to storage and not read for weeks or even months. On the other hand, it is not uncommon for a small amount of data to be written and accessed very frequently.

With Drobo's automated tiering, optimization of data doesn't stop when the data reaches a transactional or bulk storage tier. As the stored data is being read off the Drobo, the data is patterned and optimized in the background. Data that becomes hot will be moved to the transactional tier and visa versa. If data on the bulk tier is frequently read and begins to look more like transactional data, it will be migrated to the transactional tier. If data on the transactional tier becomes "cold" with very few or no read requests, it will be migrated to the bulk tier. These migrations occur in the background when the storage is not under high load and do not require any administrative interaction.

When data becomes "cold" it is migrated to the bulk tier.
When data becomes "hot" it is migrated to the transactional tier.

Tiering Without SSDs

Even when a Drobo doesn't contain SSDs, Drobo still puts its automatic tiering feature to work. Without SSDs, the advantage of tiering is to eliminate the write penalty when parity data is created.

As discussed in the BeyondRAID section, a Drobo can automatically have zones of different types. Even when all HDDs in the Drobo are the same, Drobo lays out zones differently on the transactional tier than it does on the bulk tier.

Drobo creates different zone types on transactional and bulk tiers
to tune the storage appropriately for hot and cold data.

For example, mirror zones are more optimized for writes and stripes are more optimized for capacity. Leveraging BeyondRAID technology, zones are automatically created and altered on the fly to optimize the Drobo for the type of data you store on it.

Just Add SSDs … Really!

If your Drobo contains only HDDs, but if your applications need even more performance, all you have to do is introduce SSDs to the Drobo. The SSDs then become the transactional tier and all of the HDDs are delegated to the bulk tier. The only administrative task is to insert new drives into the Drobo.

Technology:

Design
All Drobos have carrier-less drive insertion. This means there are no special parts or screws that have to be added to the drives before they are inserted. It's like inserting a cassette tape into a video recorder.

Drobo model B810i is designed to be rack mounted, but it is also compact and quiet, making it ideal for workgroup environments that need storage located in an office or on a desk.

Even the faceplate is magnetic, with the manual is on the back. Primary management is by using status lights and visual capacity gauge.

And, all Drobos look good too!

BeyondRAID Technology
Most modern storage arrays aggregate disks and prevent against single drive failures using a 20-year-old technology called RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). While RAID has served many businesses well, it requires up-front knowledge of its functionality and has many shortcomings. BeyondRAID technology built into every Drobo addresses these shortcomings and makes virtualizing disk drives usable by everyone. BeyondRAID provides these enhancements over traditional RAID:

• Thin Provisioning as a fundamental capability allows for infinite capacity expansion by just replacing a drive with a larger one
• Instant Expansion occurs when a new, or larger, drive is inserted without any disruption in service
• Mixed Drive Utilization allows you to insert any drive, of any size, or any type, and Drobo will optimally use it - check out our interactive Capacity Calculator
• Automatic Protection Levels ensures the best algorithm is used to protect from drive failure depending on the number of drives that are inserted without any user configuration
• Dual Disk Redundancy enhances BeyondRAID protection by guarding from multiple drive failures
• Virtual Hot Spare utilizes all drives at all time - no drives sitting idle waiting for one to fail
• Drobos are Data Aware, intelligently handling data for added resiliency, performance, and management
• Drive Re-ordering allows Drobo disk packs to be moved to another Drobo, and even re-ordered, while still functioning - try that with RAID

Drobo Dashboard Management
Drobo Dashboard is an easy-to-use administration tool to centrally manage all your Drobos. It displays the status of all of your Drobos as if they were right in front of you. In fact, it provides the same status lights and storage capacity usage gauge that are on the front panel of each of your Drobos. So wherever you are, you can check the health of all your disk drives and know that Drobo has your back, keeping all your data safe. Plus the dashboard handles all administration tasks simply and easily without you needing to become a storage expert. Quite simply, this is the easiest way to configure and manage business-class storage

Learn more about Drobo Dashboard.

Smart Volumes and Thin Provisioning
Create new volumes up to 64TB in seconds and manage them over time with ease. The innovative and timesaving Smart Volume management technology with Thin Provisioning integrated into the Drobo B810i allows volumes to pull storage from the common pool of disks rather than a specific physical disk allocation. The labor of resizing and migrating volumes is replaced with the simplicity of intelligent engineering. Drobo B810i supports 255 Smart Volumes of up to 64TB each.

Hybrid Storage and Tiering
The Drobo B810i moves beyond manually tuning an array for applications that have different storage requirements. Its ability to automatically tier frequently used transactional data from stored data that's seldom used enables businesses to consolidate storage resources, and share that storage across all connected clients and their applications.

When using the hybrid storage option, Drobo's Data-Aware Tiering leverages high-capacity hard disk drives (HDDs) for bulk storage, and high-performance solid state drives (SSDs) for both read and write acceleration. Drobo B810i can use the same SSDs to deliver both a Data-Aware Transactional Tier and Hot Data cache at the same time. The result is fast redundant storage with a fast read cache for an application-optimized solution that requires no manual tuning.

Optimized for Business
Similar to business applications, Drobo is ideal for building a highly scalable networked storage system or fast backup target. Drobo technology is often used with many well-known backup products including Acronis, Apple Time Machine, and Symantec Backup Exec 15.

Multi-host Connectivity
The Drobo B810i model connects seamlessly to your existingTCP/IP network and utilizes industry-standard iSCSI protocol with optional CHAP authentication to provide simple, consolidated iSCSI storage for your servers.

File and Operating System Agnostic
Drobo B810i model and its underlying BeyondRAID technology currently support the Windows and Mac platforms, with file system support for NTFS, HFS Plus, and FAT32. Since Drobo B810i is a block-level system, it easily adapts to almost any environment.

Mixed Drive Capacity Utilization
Grow your storage to meet your data capacity needs with minimal effort. To add capacity, customers can simply insert a new hard disk or replace the smallest disk with a larger one, even when all eight disk bays are full. Unlike traditional RAID systems, the BeyondRAID technology enables IT managers to efficiently mix and match disk brands, capacities and speeds. This allows for continuous expansion as disk capacities grow. Expansion is automatic, instantaneous and access to data is always maintained.

To find out exactly how much free capacity you'll have with your choice of disk capacities, try out our interactive Capacity Calculator.

Redundant Safety
Utilizing dual-disk redundancy, B810i model's BeyondRAID technology can ensure your data is safe even if up to two drives fail simultaneously - all without a moment of downtime. You can even switch between single- and dual-disk redundancy with a single click. You'll feel safer knowing that if drives do fail, Drobo B810i model automatically enters a state of self-healing in which it relays out your data across the remaining healthy drives and sectors. If a drive fails, BeyondRAID technology always returns the drive array back to the safest state possible.

Self-Healing
When B810i model detects a "bad" hard drive, it proactively advises you with a series of warnings ranging from a blinking red LED on its front panel, to pop-up alerts in Drobo Dashboard and email alerts. What B810i model does next is exceptional. It enters a self-healing mode where it repairs around the bad sector or drive, and works until it returns to the safest state possible. If B810i model has sufficient time and free capacity (indicated by all lights returning to a solid green state), it can even withstand additional hard disk failures - that's the power of self-healing.

Self-Managing
B810i model is iSCSI SAN storage that manages itself. There are no complex configuration screens, confounding choices, or other complications that prevent so many other storage devices from working out of the box. For companies that need simple, consolidated storage for multiple servers but don't want to deal with the complexities of traditional SANs, B810i model is the ideal solution. Setup can be completed in a matter of minutes and routine tasks such as expanding capacity are as simple as adding a drive or replacing the smallest drive in the array. No need to back up data or re-create a RAID array. B810i model will automatically recognize the additional capacity and make it immediately available to all Smart Volumes and applications.

Storage Virtualization
BeyondRAID was designed from the ground up to allow the storage capacity of the array to expand and contract. BeyondRAID makes this a simple process by utilizing a technology called "virtualization." Virtualization provides a layer of abstraction between the data requested, by the file system, and the physical location of that data on the disk drives. A given piece of data can be located on any drive, and on any physical location on that drive. This is what makes adding a drive to a B810i model so simple. The new drive just provides additional places to store data.

Virtualization is what enables BeyondRAID to effortlessly change the data arrangement on the drives, for example, changing data stored as a mirror into data stored as parity stripe without interrupting the user access to data. Virtualization completely decouples the physical space available in the array from the space reported to the operating system. This is how BeyondRAID is able to eliminate the need to manually expand/contract the file system as more space becomes available or is removed.

Drive Re-ordering
One long-standing requirement inherent in traditional RAID-based systems was that, if for some reason you needed to remove the drives, you'd have to replace them in the exact same order. When you remove your disks from B810i model, you can put them back in any order you like.

Specifications:

Technical Specifications
Connectivity	2 x Gigabit Ethernet ports for data 1 x Gigabit Ethernet port for management
Drives and Expansion	Up to eight (8) 3.5” SATA or solid state drives (SSDs). 4KN disk support Drives of any manufacturer, capacity, spindle speed, and/or cache can be used. No carriers or tools required for 2.5” SSD carriers Expandable by adding drives or hot-swapping drives with larger ones. Use the Capacity Calculator to estimate available storage in various configurations.
BeyondRAID Features	Thin Provisioning Instant Expansion Mixed Drive Size Utilization Background Data Integrity Scrubbing Single or Dual-Disk Redundancy Virtual Hot Spare Data Aware Drive Re-ordering
Management	Drive bay indicator lights, capacity gauge, status lights Drobo Dashboard version 2.8 or later Drobo Dashboard email alerts
Operating System Support	Mac OS X 10.8 and higher Windows 10 32 and 64 bit Windows 8/8.1 32 and 64 bit Windows 7 32 and 64 bit Windows Server 2012 32 and 64 bit Windows Server 2008 R2 32 and 64 bit
File Systems Supported	Mac OS X: HFS+ Windows: NTFS VMware: VMFS
Network Protocols	iSCSI CHAP Authentication MPIO Support
Ethernet Features	Jumbo frames (up to 9000 bytes MTU)
Hardware Features	Carrier-less Drive Bays for 3.5″ Drives Rackmount Kit 19″
Additional Software Features	Hybrid Storage Automated Data-Aware Tiering Automated Hot Data Cache Drive Spin Down Utilizing Lynux Version 3.2
Power and Cooling	Internal Power Supply: AC Input - 100/240 VAC, 1.8/0.75 A, 50/60 Hz Power Consumption - Idle System (standby, drives off): 13 watts Typical Idle System (drive spin down mode, eight (8) drives): 25 watts Typical Busy System (four (4) drives): 82 watts Dual, fixed cooling fans
Dimensions	Width: 12.7 in (309.1 mm) Height: 5.46 in (138.7 mm) Depth: 14.1 in (358.1 mm) Desktop or 3U Rack Mount Form Factor (rack mount kit optional)
Weight	16lb 3oz (7.4 kg) without hard drives or packaging
Environmentals	Operating Temperature: 10°C - 35°C (50° - 95°F) Non-Operating Temperature (storage): -10° - 60°C (14° - 140°F) Operating Humidity: 5% - 80%
Acoustics	Normal Operation: 30.4 dB
Certifications	Environmental: RoHS, WEEE, REACH Regulatory: FCC Part 15 Class B; Canada ICES - 003; Class B; CE Mark; CISPR22 Class B; VCCI Approval to V.3; ACA Approval to AS/NZS 3548 Safety: UL, cUL, TUV, CB
Warranty	One (1) year warranty in the US or outside the EU or two (2) year warranty in the EU (as provided by EU law)
Optional Accessories	Drobo 8-Bay Rack Mount Kit

Diagram:

Sample Light Indicators Diagram

Capacity Calculator:

Use these interactive tools to estimate the amount of data storage available to fit your needs.

Drag drives and place them into the slots. To remove one from a slot just click on it.

This tool is for approximating the space utilisation with various mixed disk configurations. Actual disk sizes can vary between vendors, and values calculated may differ slightly from actual results. Please refer to Drobo Dashboard for precise data calculations for storage installed in your Drobo.

Documentation:

Drobo B810i Datasheet (.PDF)