SANTA CLARA, CA — (Marketwired) — 03/17/15 — , the award-winning maker of smart storage arrays for businesses and professionals, today announced major capacity and performance enhancements to the hybrid storage system designed for small-and medium-sized businesses. Featuring standard and hybrid storage configurations that automatically tier data between traditional hard drives and solid state drives, the Drobo B1200i delivers a level of automation and technical sophistication usually reserved for more expensive and complicated enterprise storage solutions.

Currently used by thousands of businesses, the Drobo B1200i is an ideal way to simplify and consolidate both physical and virtual storage in a single array with “on-demand” ability to scale both capacity and performance. Major enhancements to the award-winning Drobo B1200i include:

: High-workload tasks now run in parallel resulting in significantly improved performance

: Larger storage pools can now take full advantage of high-capacity drives including Seagate® 6TB Enterprise Capacity SATA drives

: Previously limited to 16TB, B1200i volumes can now go as large as 64TB on supported platforms (Windows, Mac and VMware)

: Allows the creation of up to 255 volumes per B1200i appliance. Drobo Smart Volumes pull storage from a common pool of disks rather than silos of physical disks

: This bare-metal hypervisor installs directly on a physical server while transparently using Drobo storage

“These enhancements easily make the B1200i the most expandable and highest performing Drobo in history. Our highly scalable, centralized storage system coupled with our innovative data tiering provides business users with impressive workload throughput for transaction-based applications,” said Tony Hampel, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Drobo. “When configured with Seagate Enterprise Capacity SATA drives, users will have a high capacity, reliable, and intelligent hybrid storage array that seamlessly integrates into any organization–s network and application infrastructure.”

Drobo–s hybrid storage technology automates the provisioning, deployment and performance acceleration for a fast tier of solid-state drive (SSD) storage. Users can now take advantage of traditional hard disk drive (HDD) capacity plus SSD acceleration across all of their applications. This process happens automatically and transparently as soon as SSD drives are added to the deployed Drobo. Drobo intelligently differentiates between streaming and transactional data to enable instantaneous and intelligent data tiering that increase overall performance by directing transactional data to the SSDs. As data access patterns change, Drobo automatically reallocates the data between the HDDs and SSDs to maximize performance.

“As a valued partner of Seagate, we–re excited to see Drobo leverage our best in class Enterprise Capacity SATA HDDs to deliver maximum capacity and performance in a powerful new storage solution,” said John Casalaspi, Vice President, Seagate America Sales and Marketing. “These drives are optimized for 24×7 environments and offer exceptional reliability, availability and serviceability to a variety of small business customers.”

The B1200i represents many firsts for the Drobo product family: it is the first product 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. Field replaceable units can be sourced for protection against a single hardware component failure to ensure maximum availability.

The Drobo B1200i is ideal for building a scalable backup server or server virtualization cluster. It is certified for VMware vSphere, Symantec Backup Exec and Veeam Backup environments.

Like all Drobos, the B1200i is built with Drobo–s award-winning BeyondRAID technology that protects users– data without any intervention, even in the event of multiple drive failures. Users can switch from single to dual disk redundancy with a single click for enterprise-level dual parity data protection. With BeyondRAID, the B1200i is self-healing and has virtual hot-spares. Should a drive fail, Drobo will automatically return the data to a protected state without intervention or disruption.

Drobo B1200i with 72TB HDD: MSRP USD $13,799
Drobo B1200i Hybrid with 48TB HDD and 720GB SSD: MSRP USD $12,599
Drobo B1200i Hybrid with 36TB HDD and 720GB SSD: MSRP USD $8,499
Drobo B1200i with no disks: MSRP USD $3,999

These new Drobo B1200i configurations are now generally available from authorized partners.

Drobo makes award-winning storage arrays that provide an unprecedented combination of data protection, expandability, and ease of use. Based on the patented and proven BeyondRAID technology, Drobo delivers the best storage experience ever for hundreds of thousands of consumers, professionals, and businesses. For more information, visit .

Drobo, BeyondRAID, and the Drobo logo are trademarks of Drobo, Inc., which may be registered in some jurisdictions. All other trademarks used belong to their respective owners.

Sabrina Sanchez
The Ventana Group

(925) 785-3014

Nicole Gorman
The Ventana Group

(508) 397-0131

  hybrid-storage, hybrid-storage-array