I was at Starbucks recently and heard some interesting conversation about syncing files between Drobo units.
I am curious about this idea but have another idea. Sure syncing between two Drobo enclosures would be great, but wouldn’t a file replication application, either on the Drobo or on the desktop do the job just as well? Perhaps what Drobo should consider is some technology and a subscription service to replicate data stored on my Drobo with Amazon S3.
Set a price point based on the size of the customers Drobo at the time of sale or create several models of pricing so that small medium and large Drobo storage can be replicated there.
Like a dropbox situation for your Drobo. Just a thought at this point, but syncing to the cloud might be an additional solution especially if the customer only has one site.
Perhaps per GB pricing won’t work here because there isn’t a flat fee structure, but allowing Drobo to provide x TB of disk at S3 for data replication would help with off site storage/backup and allow the data to be backed up by Amazon to reduce failure points.
For the smaller shops considering or even using a Drobo, this might be a great solution for off site backup. Sure multiple Drobo units syncing across the network or a VPN is a great solution, it just seems that a way to push this straight to the cloud, using something similar to DroboSync might be an additional offering.
Now if only I were a developer with the time to create such an application or if it existed or was being planned already… Thoughts anyone?
Would be great to heard from the Tech Field Day delegates attending in February, perhaps we can get some ideas from Drobo on the topic.
