The Red Ferret is a big fan of Drobo, the RAID-like USB storage extravaganza, Nigel awarded it the Red Ferret Computer Product of the Year award for 2007. Well since Drobo released the Ethernet interface a year or so back, it’s been pretty quiet over at Data Robotics … until now. Behold the DroboPro.

The DroboPro still has everything people have come to love about the Drobo, but with more redundancy and heaps more drive space, up to 16TB worth over 8 drives. Drobo use a proprietary BeyondRAID storage architecture which allows a mixed array of hard drives of any size to serve as the volume. You can also switch between single drive redundancy (if 1 drive fails you’re still safe) to dual drive redundancy (can survive 2 drive failures but eats more drive space) all with just a click. No more reformatting or messing about. You don’t need to fill all the drive bays either, just add more discs as you need them. It’s also rack mountable so you can tuck it away somewhere quiet and you can connect to it via FireWire800 or USB 2.0.

The Pro adds built-in networkability via a protocol called iSCSI, or SCSI-over-Ethernet, which Drobo chose for its better performance. They also claim that they’ve taken the tricky out of iSCSI so it’s dead-simple to configure and you can still share the DroboPro via your server and standard Ethernet architecture and it runs with OS X or Windows. No prices yet.

Introducing DroboPro, the first business class storage array that manages itself. Engineered to be both simple and scalable, the revolutionary BeyondRAID technology incorporated into DroboPro frees businesses of making the difficult and confining choices commonly associated with storage management.

Tags: drobo, drobopro, drobo+pro, data+storage, home+networking