Today Drobo (makers of the original DroboPro and newer Drobo 4-bay Gen3) have launched an update to their B800i iSCSI SAN device:

The B810i comes with several improvements over preceding products in the line:

  • Performance
    • 180MB/s reads / 110 MB/s writes (across a pair of iSCSI enabled Gigabit Ethernet ports).
  • New 64TB max volume size
    • Drobos previously were limited by a 16TB maximum volume size, meaning that additional volumes were required to fully utilize >16TB of HDD storage present.
    • This volume size is being backported to some of the previous Drobo models, first with the 5D and most recently the 5N.
  • Data Tiering
    • SSDs installed as part of the array are automatically assigned to caching duties.
    • Cache performance is claimed 5-10x faster than the 'cold' HDD tier.
  • Cache Pre-heat
    • Metadata describing the contents / duplicated data in the cache is also saved to the array, meaning the cache can survive a reboot of the device.
  • Accelerated self-healing
    • Drobo claims rebuilds are now 8x faster. This is due to increased parallelism taking place during that process.
    • This is in addition to Drobo rebuilds that have only ever needed to re-duplicate the data present (and not all disks front to back as with traditional RAID).
  • BeyondRAID

Along with this launch, Drobo is running a promotion where sales by 4/30/2016 will receive two free 2TB HDDs as part of the $1699 purchase of a B810i.

The B810i replaces the B800i in the current Drobo lineup:

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We're working on a round of NAS / SAN pieces here…

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…along with an ioSafe 1515+, which would have collapsed the desk if I had it tried to fit it into this picture. That 75 lb beast will have to stay on the floor :).