Drobo has been around for a while in the consumer market with a really cool enclosure that you can put four HDDs of any capacity or brand into and get RAID protection and data security. The Drobo consumer devices are very good for backing up data, but aren't really large enough for a business that has large quantities of data.

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Drobo has announced a new business line of gear and among that gear is a new 12-bay SAN called the B1200i. The 12-bay device has smaller siblings that include the 8-bay B800fs and B800i units. The business units are aimed at higher performance than the consumer line and all have been verified to work with enterprise software.

The Drobo business line will work with Citrix, Exchange, SharePoint, Symantec backup, and VMware. The entry-level unit is the B800fs and it is aimed at network file sharing and can be used for remote backup. The B800i us a SAN that is designed to deliver content over iSCSI for a work group storage system. The NB1200i adds extra redundancy features with data-aware tiering and thin provisioning as an option. The two 8-bay units are available now with the B1200i shipping later.