Drobo: Virtualized Disk Drives

The Drobo is an intelligent and easy to use personal storage system from Data Robotics and there are a ton of reviews out there.  This is not a review but a discussion on what I find compelling about this product and its core technology.  To me it represents a leap in fundamental storage technology -- virtualizing disk drives for greater simplicity and efficiency. 

Drobo makes multiple SATA disk drives look like one big "virtual" disk drive.  Drobo elegantly enables this at consumer levels of simplicity.  Drobo virtualizes all of the disk drives transparently - they can be any size and make as long as its SATA.  The current Drobo products supports up to 4 SATA disk drives.  You can start out with one disk drive and keep adding as you go -- or any combination -- 2, 3 or 4 disk drives.  When you want more capacity just add another drive. 

One of the best capabilities of Drobo is you can easily remove a disk drive and replace it with another one -- online and transparently.  This is handy if a disk drive fails - you don't lose any data -- because it is keeping copies of your data on the other disk drives in the system.  Just replace the faulty disk drive with another one -- it is easier than changing a DVD.  Another reason to replace disk drives is for more capacity.  Let's say you already have all 4 Drobo slots taken up by disk drives but need more space.  Get a bigger disk drive and replace one of the four.  Drobo will move data to the new drive making it part of the big "virtual" disk drive.  Again - this is all done online and transparently.

All of these operations are done because Drobo is highly virtualized.  That is the special sauce, the "magic" if you will.

Many storage people get confused by the value proposition of Drobo because they compare it to RAID.  However, the difference between Drobo and RAID is that Drobo is SIMPLE.  The analogy I use in comparing Drobo to RAID is like comparing a GUI to a command line interface. 

The Drobo technology virtualizes disk drives overcoming many of their key physical limitations and making them greater than the sum of their parts.  I love to come up with new acronyms.  How about Virtualized Disk Drives = VDD. 

Data Robotics has manifested their compelling disk drive virtualization with the Drobo product and I believe the potential impact goes beyond a product or product family. I see value in virtualizing any system with multiple disk drives this simply and efficiently.  In other words, Drobo is to disk drives what VMware is to processors.  Consider the implications.