Data Robotics unveils Drobo FS for SOHO market 7 April, 2010 By Mark Cox

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Data Robotics started in 2007, and had its' major launch in July 2008. It started selling to the creative market, and has continued to launch new prosumer products targeted at markets like video editors. But it has also come up with offerings that have been pulled up into SMBs and the small workgroup market of enterprise customers. The prosumer offerings typically compete against Netgear, Iomega and Taiwanese companies like QNAP. The corporate offerings compete with the low end of the product range of large OEMs like Dell and HP, and do so by offering a lower price point.

"Our competitors are so expensive that customers get sticker shock," said Malissa King, Vice President, North America Sales at Data Robotics. "We have 90% of the features at 30% of the cost."-

"The Drobo FS will span all these markets -- prosumers, small offices, and also workgroups -- with a product that will allow all of them to share," King said.

"More than ever before, home users and small offices want to access and share a growing amount of data, but they don't need a large, expensive system that requires specific expertise or extensive management," said Liz Conner, research analyst for IDCs storage systems and personal storage practices. With DroboApps, users can customize the Drobo FS to serve their unique storage requirements. This is the Drobo for which many users have been waiting."

Data Robotics did have a product like this before -- sort of.

"DroboShare used USB to connect to the Drobo, so its performance was limited, and it wasn't a single device, while Drobo FS has four times the performance," said Jim Sherhart, the company's Senior Director of Marketing. "A lot of these will go to our audience that loves the Drobo concept but wants a single device they can stick out on the network."

The Drobo concept revolves around self-managing devices through its' virtualized BeyondRaid technology.

"We wanted a product that would make RAID completely painless," Sherhart said. "Auto-configuring, auto-managing, self-healing. BeyondRAID makes us different." BeyondRAID also lets the Drobo FS continually examine data blocks and sectors on each drive to flag potential issues. The preemptive "scrubbing" helps ensure data is being written only to healthy drive areas and automatically keeps data in the safest state possible -- even when a drive fails.

The Drobo FS connects directly to any Gigabit Ethernet network for a true plug in and share set-up experience. It supports standard data transfer protocols including Apple File Protocol (AFP) and Microsoft Common Internet File System (CIFS).

The Drobo FS dual drive redundancy option protects against the simultaneous failure of up to two hard drives. Customers can engage this option with a single click without ever losing access to their data.

Customers also have access to the growing library of DroboApps, including media and web applications, which lets users customize the Drobo FS to further enhance their sharing experience. DroboApps is also one way the company is able to keep the selling price down.

"We allow through Drobo Apps people who want to add extra features to do so, Sherhart said. "So the 90% of people who couldn't care about FTP don't have to get it."

Data Robotics has approximately 1600 partners, mainly VARs catering to SMB space, and with an emphasis on remote offices.

"We sell the boxes empty to the partners so they can add drives," King said. "We work to get the price down for them so they can compete with the CDWs. We also partner with VMware, and there are additional opportunities for them there."

"This also gives salespeople a cool reason to call their customers, as it's a creative thing not available elsewhere, King added."

Drobo FS is currently available at a starting price of $699 MSRP, with multiple configurations to $1,449 for a 10TB (5x 2TB drives) bundle.