Testimonials
Drobo protecting important research data at The University of Cambridge
It's every IT Manager's responsibility to ensure that his (or her) organisation's important data is stored securely. But it's a really neat trick to find the right balance between draconian policies that force everyone to work 'inside the box', and maintenance of a pleasant working environment where users feel empowered to organise their work according to their individual needs or preferences. Given the choice, many users will always prefer to keep their data locally, and when they outgrow their workstation's internal disk they'll buy an even bigger external disk and fill that too; and so on. The advantages to the user are obvious - external hard disks are cheap to buy, fast to access, very easy to install and use, and they immediately provide a huge amount of extra space for all the files they can't be bothered to sort or delete. However, the disadvantages to an IT Manager are also painfully obvious: Terabytes of unique data proliferating all over the site, on vulnerable drives which aren't protected by any backup system - the thought of what could go wrong is enough to keep me awake at night!
For the last few weeks we've been testing a new device called 'Drobo', which provides a solution to my fears and those users' needs. It's a very neat little black box which sits next to any USB-equipped computer, and contains empty slots to accommodate up to four 'normal' internal hard disk drives. You can install two or more disks, from 80GB up to 1TB, in any order or combination of sizes, and the device distributes data across those disks in such a way that if any single disk fails, you can eject it, chuck it away and replace it with a new disk (same size or larger), without powering down, and the data is miraculously restored. The system uses some of the disks' capacity to provide this protection, so if you install 4x 1TB disks for example, you'll end up with 3TB of space.
I saw a video on the Data Robotics website showing Drobo in operation, and I was immediately curious - I couldn't figure out how the data was being stored to allow this kind of hardware redundancy. It seemed too good and too simple to be true! So we bought a couple and started testing, and short of actually setting fire to the Drobo units, we've tried to 'break' the test data in every way we can think of and haven't succeeded so far. I still can't figure out how it does what it does, but it does it very well and I'm very impressed. It's also surprisingly inexpensive
- with 350GB disks currently costing around £60 each, you can build a very secure Terabyte drive for less then £600. There are cheaper, insecure drives available of course, but consider the expense (and the chance of success) of data recovery in the event of failure.
I strongly encourage anyone who's in the market for directly attached, external storage, to have a look at Drobo. I'd also encourage anyone who's ever suffered the misery of unprotected hard disk failure to consider using Drobo.
Alastair Downie
University of Cambridge
August 2007
