Recently, SSG-NOW tested the Drobo B800i, an iSCSI SAN for small and mid-sized businesses. In our limited testing the B800i worked as advertised. It survived the removal of a drive in single-drive protection mode and survived the removal of two drives in dual-drive protection mode.
Recently, SSG-NOW tested the Drobo B800i, an iSCSI SAN for small and mid-sized businesses. In our limited testing the B800i worked as advertised. It survived the removal of a drive in single-drive protection mode and survived the removal of two drives in dual-drive protection mode.
When drives fail or are removed LEDs on the Drobo, as well as the display on Drobo Dashboard, indicate that a failure has occurred and that a rebuild is in progress. The rebuild time is usually several hours, but the system still functions properly during the rebuild process, albeit with reduced performance. In testing, the performance impact during rebuild was approximately in the 40% range under heavy I/O load. Under normal loads the impact should be fairly negligible. During the rebuild Drobo Dashboard displays the amount of time the rebuild is expected to take, but we did not find this to reflect the actual rebuild time. In some cases rebuild took less time, in others more.
A few improvements, SSG-NOW would like to see in the B800i:
• Port aggregation, to allow both iSCSI ports to connect in parallel to improve performance.
• Better support for Linux, with something equivalent to Drobo Dashboard.
• Support for Microsoft’s Hyper-V.
With a list price of $3,499 without drives the B800i isn’t cheap, but pricing is in line with other iSCSI SANs of similar capacity. What the B800i provides that competitors don’t is an amazing amount of flexibility. Drobo allows you to add and remove drives, change disk capacity and change the protection level pretty much at will without affecting operation. Thin provisioning allows you to create volumes larger than existing disk space and add capacity as needed. Other than initial volume configuration nearly all functions can be handled from the front of the Drobo itself. LEDs tell you if capacity is low or if a drive has failed (and which one) and if a rebuild is in progress. If you have enough disk space Drobo will rebuild itself using the existing drives and still provide the protection level you have chosen. If not, Drobo will continue operating without protection until the failed drive is replaced.
Replacing a failed drive is simplicity itself – press the lever below the drive (a red LED indicates which drive has failed) to eject the drive then hold the lever down to insert a new drive. You don’t have another drive of the same capacity? No problem, you can add a larger drive or, if you have enough free disk space, even a smaller drive. Since Drobo supports all current SATA drives, a B800i can currently be expanded to 24TB using eight 3TB drives. As larger drives become available Drobo should be able to handle those as well.
Overall, the B800i is an easy-to-use, easy-to-install and easy-to-manage SAN with exceptional flexibility and expansion potential.
*Note: Drobo is not a client of SSG-NOW.
To be continued at https://www.ssg-now.com/product-test-the-drobo-b800i-iscsi-san/
