Company: Drobo, Inc., San Jose, CA
Company Description: Drobo makes award-winning data storage products for Small and Medium Businesses and Individual Professionals that provide an unprecedented combination of sophisticated data protection and management features, affordable capacity, and ease-of-use. Winner of over 50 industry awards, Drobo has solved the three major storage challenges – data protection, capacity adjustment, and application service.
Nomination Category: Products & Product Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: New Product or Service of the Year - Hardware - Storage

Nomination Title: Drobo B1200i: Application-Optimized Storage for SMB IT

Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 500 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and performance to date.

Built on proven BeyondRAID™ technology, coupled with new and innovative Automated Data-Aware Tiering, the Drobo B1200i delivers a level of automation and technical sophistication usually reserved for more expensive enterprise solutions. All in a product as easy to use as a Drobo. The Drobo B1200i is optimized for SMB IT to provide reliable, high-performance, and self-optimizing storage for server virtualization, email, and data protection. It integrates seamlessly into your TCP/IP network infrastructure and utilizes the industry-standard iSCSI protocol to provide powerful, yet simple, consolidated storage for your IT environment.

BeyondRAID Technology: A Drobo B1200i iSCSI array can hold up to 36TB of raw storage and beyond. 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, 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: Automated Data-Aware Tiering allows businesses to consolidate storage resources and share that storage across all connected servers and their applications. The Drobo B1200i moves beyond 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.
(* Automated Data-Aware Tiering will support SSDs in a software update targeted for Q1 2012.)

Smart Volumes & Thin Provisioning: Create new volumes up to 16TB in seconds and manage them over time with ease. The innovative and time-saving Smart Volumes™ 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.

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, Citrix XenServer, Symantec Backup Exec, and Veeam Backup environments.

Designed for IT Environments: The B1200i is the first Drobo with serviceable modular components: 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.

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Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that developed this nominated product or service:

Julian Terry, Co-Founder and Chief Architect: Julian Terry is a founder of Drobo Corporation and is still very active on the Engineering team as one of the principal architects for our core technology, BeyondRAID. Prior to Drobo, Julian was Head of Research at Phoenix Corporation and managed all engineering development and support for Europe, Middle East and Africa. Julian was Head of Engineering at DIP, where he was responsible for the design of the world's first handheld PC compatible computer. Julian earned his honors degree in Computer Systems Engineering from the University of Bristol, UK.