Contemplating IT

If you are interested in the Drobo family of products you will probably read a bunch of articles about the new Drobo Elite. They will all talk about the speeds and feeds of the product. While this is important stuff it misses what I think is the very essence of what makes the Drobo and the growing product family important to the market.

Interestingly, the people that are least excited about Drobo are usually storage people. They just don't get what makes the Drobo such a cool and valuable product. I have been in meetings where dyed-in-the-wool storage people scratch their heads and can't figure out how Drobo Beyond RAID is that different or better than legacy RAID. One such person looked at me after the meeting and said - "You can do all the things with regular RAID that the Drobo does." It is sort of like trying to explain to someone that has used command lines their entire careers the value of a GUI. They just look at you funny.

And it is also like saying you can do all the things with a physical server that you can with a virtual server. Which gets me to my market analogy: What VMware has done for processors - Drobo has done for disk drives. Think about the implications of that!

Drobo has truly virtualized disk drives and thereby transcends their physical limitations. Let's take this comparison a bit further - VMware enables you to have multiple servers running on a single processor. The implementation is simple, elegant and transparent to the users and applications. Additionally, virtual servers are not tethered to the processors but rather can be easily moved as needed.

Storage and subsequently disk drives present a different challenge than processors and servers. With storage you actually want to have multiple disk drives appear as one big disk drive. Drobo does this transparently, easily and elegantly. The key is that Drobo is not tethered to the disk drives. You can start out with any number of disk drives - one, two, three, etc and then add as you go. You can use disk drives of different sizes and without penalties. As disk drive get bigger and bigger you can just keep replacing them perpetually for more capacity. I just added a 2 TB disk drive to my Drobo while it was online and it was literally easier than loading a DVD in my DVD player.

Drobo and its BeyondRAID simplifies storage so much that it requires no skill to operate the device. If that sounds familiar it is because that is how Alexander Graham Bell explained why the telephone was so successful - "It requires no skill to operate the device". And that is the Drobo's key value proposition.

Another poignant quote from a storage architect when contemplating where network storage needs to go: "We need to get storage to reach consumer levels of ease of use". That is what Drobo has realized.

What is the downside of this story? I think getting in the SAN business will make life a bit tougher for Data Robotics. And they need to consider more complex go-to-market strategies and building a viable and healthy channel. Additionally, they will be compared to other iSCSI SAN solutions and may be pulled into the feature-creep race - which can be costly and distracting. They will also start to get more competition from major storage vendors that will use whatever leverage they can against them.

Drobo isn't perfect. But neither is VMware and they did pretty well

The Drobo Elite enables Data Robotics to go after a new and untapped market in the SAN storage arena. Data Robotics have created for themselves a blue ocean market in storage. The Drobo Elite is a true SMB SAN storage system that is easier and more cost effective than anything else out there in the market with fundamentally no competition. Small companies, very small companies, departmental servers, remote offices, budget conscious IT folks, testing labs, and new users of SAN storage will emerge to buy Drobo Elite because its so easy and cost effective. And over the last two years Data Robotics has built a brand, a company and a ton of momentum. That is why Drobo Elite matters.