plan of attack for replacing DroboFS?

Laconic

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Our small shop uses an older DroboFS for project/data storage, and accessing it can sometimes be quite a slow task (especially for me, when I'm dealing with Adobe files that range from 20mb - 1GB). I've posted here and other places regarding various PC upgrades for myself and co workers, and performance improvements, but a lot have mentioned that the DroboFS will always be the bottleneck.

This is becoming a more widely accepted issue in the shop, but the major hurdle is providing a palatable solution to the ones that sign the checks at the end of the week. I know enough about hardware to "get by", but not nearly enough to present a good solution with fact and reasoning.

So my question is, is this older model Drobo actually the issue? What would be the best solution to this issue, and what would be the cheapest? I've heard newer Drobos are far better, would purchasing a new one and sliding our old drives into that be wise?

Thanks!
 
What's the network look like? Can I assume it's Gigabit? Are there existing servers there already?

What's the budget for a replacement solution? What's the next few years look like in terms of data expansion?
 
It is. As far as price range I'm sorry to say I am really not sure. As this is pretty much a blind situation, and also part of the reason I was looking for the best solution, and maybe a more economical solution, that way we have a few possibilities to explore.

As far as storage goes, we still have 12.6TB of 15.9TB available, so space isn't currently an issue.
 
Drobo's are generally slow. Granted, opening a 1GB Adobe file is never going to be a quick process. (10gbe + SSD would fix that)
 
It depends on what you want and how big of a budget you have. Is that 500$, 1000$, 5000$.
You said you still have enough free disk. How much space do you plan you'll need in the next years? How many GB/year?
How about backups, do you have them, do you wan't them? Is there a special budget for it?
How's network? 1GBps?
How do you access files now on drobo? SMB? NFS?
How valuable are your data? What happens if you loose them?

You could probably go FreeNAS/OmniOS-nappit way, if you are looking for a "low" budget solution.
Matej
 
Thanks for the feedback, guys. It looks like the drives are rather slow as well (5400), so I'm sure that contributes.

I'm unsure of the redundancy of the Drobo, drives have failed before and have been replaced without loss. But if we were to lose everything on it, it would be catastrophic. File access wise, I'm not sure on the classification, but I'm assuming SMB. I've considered the idea of us building something, as I do tinker at home with my own set up, but doing it for work I'm considerably more hesitant about.

I'll look into Smallnetbuilder, thanks!
 
From your last post (where it would be catastrophic were you to lose what is on the Drobo) I take that as meaning you have no backups outside the NAS. Keep in mind that multiple drive failure is always possible, as is something as simple as its power supply going and taking the Drobo and ALL of the hard drives with it. Especially in a business setting, this is like playing russian roulette.
 
I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about that as well. A more elegant solution overall is very much needed, it seems. Especially now with how old ours is, and never shut off.
 
Since you are affraid to loose everything, I would go with double servers and clone them.

You have many options:
- 2x synology, where 1st one is in sync with 2nd one
- 2x drobo setted up the same as above
- 2x HP Microserver with OmniOS or FreeNAS and kept in sync with ZFS send/receive
- 2x HP Microserver with NexentaStor(commercially supported solaris)

Probably some other options as well. Since this is bussiness, it's good to have someone to blame or seek help. On the other hand, Nexenta and FreeNAS offer commercial support and you get all the benefits of a ZFS filesystem.

Take a look at:
http://www.ixsystems.com/storage/
http://www.nexenta.com/

there are probably some windows solutions as well, but I'm not familiar with them, since I use linux/solaris for such projects...

Matej
 
So with this new information, it looks like the "economical" option would be to grab another Drobo, and have it an our current work together? And the ideal route being to get two completely new systems.

Levak I agree with you 100% about having a 3rd party setting this all up. Just a matter of finding someone to do so. Thanks for your input!
 
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