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back to article Storage firm Drobo gets mysterious cash injection

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 …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Rackmount is already available

    http://www.drobo.com/products/drobopro/

    (DroboPro Rack Mount sold separately.)

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  2. M. Burns Silver badge
    Boffin

    You raise capital to expand

    Not to live on. (Living on your raised capital is what failing start-ups do.) So if they are really seeing all that growth, they need cash to expand.

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  3. AL-Benjamin

    Rackmount drobo?

    I may have gotten lost in a sea of sarcasm - but they already make a rackmount drobo calling it the DroboPro. However the rackmount kit does need to be purchased as an extra.

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  4. David Buckley

    Rackmount expension?

    Expand with a rackmount unit...what you meen like the drobo pro with the rack kit attached?

    Not like that's hard to see on the website

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Research, we've heard of it.

    http://www.drobo.com/products/drobopro/

    ..are their rather neat little rackmount storage boxes. You need to buy the rails, but that's sometimes the case with other kit of that sort too, even Big Blue have days like that.

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  6. Chris Mellor 1

    Drobo and rackmount formfactor

    I'm told the 8-slot DroboPro, shipping since April, has an optional rackmount kit.

    Chris.

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  7. Chris Mellor 1

    Better NFS

    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.

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  8. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    if i had the money i'd buy one...

    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...

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  9. James O'Brien
    Paris Hilton

    As everyone has already said....

    Rackmount? Yeah we have that.

    Drobo makes a nice little unit though Im still at odds on its propritary RAID(?) system.

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  10. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    I love drobo... opensolaris with zfs was not a far stretch

    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

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