Rackmount is already available
http://www.drobo.com/products/drobopro/
(DroboPro Rack Mount sold separately.)
Drobo, the supplier of stylish 4- or 8-bay add your own drives external storage boxes, has raised $10m in an E-round funding exercise. Quite why is not obvious, since the company is shipping product like a tropical storm. It had 100 per cent worldwide sales growth in the second quarter of 2008, and has had double-digit growth …
Sent to me:-
[A] 16-slotter sounds great, and I have no doubt that they'd waltz out the door if Drobo ever released such a model.
Personally, I'm quite keen to see a rackmount Drobo with onboard CIFS/SMB and/or NFS. The DroboPro supports iSCSI, which is a great starting point, and BeyondRAID is fantastic, but the lack of true onboard NAS functionality is (in my opinion) causing a number of buyers to consider other options.
I guess we wait and see what Drobo say!
Cheers ... Chris.
and the PR bunny in the vid is sooo hot!!!
this is probably one of the better products out there, which is why they sell like hot cakes....
did i mention the hottie in the vid :D
thier margins are probably quite slim but are going for market share, hopefully they will expand and come out of the depression with a good customer base and expanding market.
oh and we need a WIN! logo...
I love drobo, but the price is too high for the box without the drives
+ drobo only allows the loss of the largest drive while multiple mirrors under ZFS forces 50% loss of storage
+ drobo offered high-speed firewire, so slower usb was not required
- ZFS with checkums can use drives formatted with less hardware CRC overhead, to redeem some lost space from RAID1
- cheaper to build an Intel/AMD OpenSolaris box
- just about as easy to add/swap drives in pairs to allow ZFS to automatically expand the volume
- the volume size under ZFS works while the volume size is not correct under drobo
- write & read acceleration possible with flash under ZFS while drobo gets no benefit
- 16 Gigabyte file system limit in drobo, no such artificial limit in ZFS
yea... i went to the store to check out the drobo, loved the simple design of the drobo, decided on zfs instead