Drobo B1200i 12-Bay iSCSI NAS Storage Array, 3x Gigabit Ethernet Ports for iSCSI, 1x Gigabit Ethernet Port for Management, Supports HDDs & SSDs

The Drobo B1200i 12-Bay iSCSI NAS Storage Array features 12 drive bays capable of holding 3.5" hard disk drives and solid state drives making this a versatile hard drive enclosure. Aside from 12 drive bays, this Drobo storage array comes complete with three Gigabit Ethernet ports designated for iSCSI use and one Gigabit Ethernet port for system management. Managing and configuring your array has also been simplified through the use of Drobo's own BeyondRAID technology allowing you to replace drives without the need to power down or restart the array.

This Drobo Storage Array supports a variety of operating systems including Mac OS X Server, Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, VMware vSphere 4.1.x and Citrix xenServer 5.6 allowing you to integrate this array into virtually any system configuration. Along with versatile OS compatibility you benefit from enhanced file system compatibility with Windows NTFS and FAT32, Mac OS X HFS+, Linux ext3, VMware vSphere VMFS and Citrix xenServer LVM.

Once configured, you can take advantage of Drobo Dashboard enabling you to monitor multiple Drobo devices via the intuitive dashboard showing each Drobo as if you were looking at it in person. See the status lights of each Drobo and utilize the integrated administrative options to control each unit individually.

BeyondRAID Technology
To add capacity, simply insert a new hard drive or replace your smallest drive with a larger one, even when all drive bays are full. Unlike traditional RAID systems, the BeyondRAID technology in Drobo enables you to leverage different drive capacities, allowing for continuous expansion as larger drives become available. With Drobo, expansion is automatic and instantaneous and access to data is always maintained, all while protecting you from two simultaneous drive failures.

Automated Data-Aware Tiering
The Drobo B1200i moves beyond the days of manually tuning an array for applications that have different storage requirements. Automated Data-Aware Tiering leverages high-capacity hard disk drives (HDDs) paired with high-performance solid state drives (SSDs) to deliver application-optimized storage that requires no manual tuning. SSD support with Automated Data-Aware Tiering is a available in firmware version 1.1.0 or higher.

Smart Volumes with Thin Provisioning
Create new volumes up to 16TB in seconds and manage them over time with ease. The innovative and timesaving Smart Volume management technology with Thin Provisioning integrated into the Drobo B1200i allows volumes to pull storage from the common pool of disks rather than a specific physical disk allocation. The labor of resizing and migrating volumes is replaced with the simplicity of intelligent engineering.

Designed for IT Environments
The B1200i is the first Drobo with serviceable modular components. This hardware design provides a removable controller card; dual-redundant, hot-swappable power supplies; and a hot-swappable cooling fan unit. You can source field replaceable units in advance in case of a single hardware component failure, to ensure high uptimes. This delivers the higher level of availability demanded by virtualized IT environments.

Optimizing Business Applications
Similar to business applications, Drobo is ideal for building your first server virtualization cluster, highly available email server, or scalable backup server. Drobo technology has been certified for VMware vSphere, Symantec Backup Exec and Veeam Backup environments.

About iSCSI SANs
It's a high-performance protocol that's become extremely popular storage networking technology in IT environments, but it can often be complex to manage. Drobo B800i changes that by introducing zero-click iSCSI configuration for both Windows and Mac OS X servers. With an iSCSI SAN, centralized storage is provided to each server over a high-speed Ethernet network and storage can be allocated or expanded instantaneously. Also, no single server can tie up free space and there are fewer storage devices to maintain.