Today, January 14, Data Robotics announced DroboShare, a companion product for sharing Drobo over Gigabit Ethernet. Now, for the first time, setting up a networked storage system is as simple as using an external hard drive.

We believe that DroboShare will forever change the way users, vendors, and analysts think about networked storage. Out with complexity, in with a simple always available, no-management-required protected pool of storage shared over gigabit Ethernet.

What is DroboShare?

DroboShare is a companion for Drobo that lets you share one or two Drobos over a gigabit Ethernet network providing networked access to the data stored on them. With two Drobos, your storage pool can grow up to 32 TBs. DroboShare is the most reliable and expandable desktop storage system available.

We have also added new capabilities to Drobo. Now, using OS X or Windows Vista, Drobo can create a single virtual drive up to 16TB in size. The previous 2TB limit has been removed for OSes that can support very large disk sizes.

DroboShare delivers a benefit unique in the industry: NAS When You Want It, DAS When You Need It. This means that you can share any Drobo on a network by connecting it to DroboShare. For those times where you want or must connect Drobo directly to your computer, you can. Example: network latency makes video editing impractical. Simply unplug it from DroboShare and connected it to your computer. When finished editing, plug it into DroboShare and share over the network.

What makes this feat possible? Unlike any NAS system or NAS-head on the market, DroboShare supports the most popular file systems: EXT3, FAT32, HFS+, and NTFS. You can format your Drobo and use it connected to a DroboShare, or to the computer of your choice.

We hear you cry “Hold on, did you say EXT3? Isn’t that Linux?” In a word, yes. Data Robotics is releasing beta support for EXT3 for attachment to Linux machines (excluding Dashboard). DRI have qualified EXT3 works on kernel 2.6.12 when formatted with parameters like so: mke2fs –j –i 262144 –L -m 0 –O sparse_super,^resize_inode –q /dev/. We hope members of the Linux Community will embraces this and welcome Drobo to their platform of choice.

The Drobo Dashboard will now let you view the status of Drobos connected to DroboShare. Dashboard has also been enhanced to provide email alerts so you can tuck Drobo away, out of sight and still get important status information when a disk fails or capacity runs low.

Why does DroboShare compete against complexity? What is the first impression that competing SoHo NAS products make with their owners? Answer: complexity.

Look at the time it takes to set up existing NAS products. From a web survey of over 206 owners of SoHo NAS products, the reported mean time to configure their NAS is 65 minutes. Interestingly whether the NAS used RAID or not had only minor influence on setup time. Users of NAS systems with RAID need 72 minutes to set up single drive systems. Setup time for NAS systems without RAID takes 64 minutes. Conclusion: Setting up NAS is intrinsically complex.

DroboShare eliminates complexity. Its setup is the same as Drobo (... just plug it in and you’re ready to go). Working together with Dashboard, DroboShare will figure out how to join your network, and it will automatically mount the shared Drobo(s) as a network drive(s) on your computer. And it will never drop that connection. Shared data is always one click away.

Viva DroboShare: the first networked storage system that is just as easy to setup and use as a USB disk drive.

 

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