4,000 Customers Bought Drobo in 1H11

Drobo, Inc. announced that customer adoption in the calendar first half has skyrocketed in small and medium businesses, as well as in important education and government segments.

"Over 4,000 business customers bought Drobos in the first half of this year to help run their operation, and we’ll add another 2,500 this quarter," said Tom Buiocchi, CEO of Drobo. "The beauty of Drobo is it’s so easy to set up, yet still offers the features and functionality of more expensive enterprise storage solutions, so our customers get the best of both worlds."

Drobo’s business line includes both file-sharing and networked storage models, introduces performance and scalability enhancements, new management software and extended business support and services that build on the ‘big storage in a small box’. Drobo products are based on patented BeyondRAID technology and certified for VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Exchange and Symantec backup.

New Drobo customers include East Tennessee State University (education), City of Newnan, GA (city government), Laugh Factory (entertainment) and David Peyser Sportswear, Inc. (retail), all of whom benefit from Drobo’s advanced data protection and management capabilities.

"Since implementing our two Drobos, we are no longer plagued by the intermittent connection failures that come with mapping network shares across small external drives – which is what we used prior to Drobo," said David Currie, PhD, director of eLearning digital media services at East Tennessee State University. "In today’s environment, every university must make careful budget decisions, and technology needs to be easy to use and implement, and out-perform. Drobo has ‘leap-frogged’ us to a place where our energies are expended on project content rather than project storage, and our staff has unanimously given the Drobo five out of five stars in overall performance."

"We are using Drobo for remote nightly backups with a Drobo in both City Hall, and another housed in the nearest police station," said Clifton Foster, IT director for the City of Newnan, GA, population 33,000. "One thing I love about the Drobo is that I can create virtual partitions whose combined sizes may be more than the total physical space available. I have about 10TB total physical disk space on one Drobo but it has a 1TB partition, a 2TB partition, a 4TB partition and an 8TB partition. As long as the total usage is still less than 10TB, each partition can have as much disk space as is allocated. Drobo allows us to easily perform storage related tasks and not only is our data safe, but Drobo is cost-effective, which is especially important to any small government with limited resources."