BeyondRAID™ Technology
Every Drobo product comes with the revolutionary BeyondRAID storage technology — the next generation of redundant disk protection. BeyondRAID not only keeps your data safe, but will also increases uptime and availability. BeyondRAID technology offers several improvements over traditional RAID-based storage systems, including the flexibility to replace failed disks, increase capacity and with a single click switch between single- and dual-disk redundancy, all without costly downtime.
Key features of BeyondRAID include:
Data protection against hard disk failure
Instant capacity expansion without downtime
Self-management
Automatic healing
Multi-host Connectivity
The DroboElite 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
DroboElite and its underlying BeyondRAID technology currently support the Windows, Mac, VMware, and Linux* platforms, with file system support for NTFS, HFS+, EXT3, and VMFS. Since DroboElite 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.
Redundant Safety
Utilizing dual-disk redundancy, DroboElite’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, DroboElite 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.
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 DroboElite 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.