I just canceled an order for a new Drobo from one of the Canadian resellers. At first, it looked liked an excellent fit for my Linux based server system. After ordering the box, I took a deeper look at what “Linux support” means to the Drobo folks so that I could prepare the server.
It seems that there is an active Linux community that is trying to create a complete Drobo product on behalf of the company but that the company itself is not committed to supporting a very popular O/S for the server side of things. The claims of “Linux support”, once you dig deep, actually mean that it just kinda works, with a only a very specific variant of one file system. The management tools aren’t blessed by the company. Oh, and we only support 2GB LUNs and every so often, data will become corrupted, and we don’t know why or won’t tell.
Just wanted to let you know that you’ll be down 1 unit in your sales this month and the reason why. On the surface, it looks like great product. I’m just glad that I figured out what lies beneath the surface in time to cancel.
@numbr6, did you know that DRI is an evil company whose object is to screw you? Its true. Their docs say Linux support is “in beta” what ever that means. They don’t hide the fact that they don’t have Dashboard tools for Linux. It sounds like you didn’t do your homework before ordering and are now pissing on the company and product. They deserve it, afterall, since they are evil and publish their limitations.
As one of the enthusiastic-but-frustrated Linux users:
After reading in the other groups info about a bug when using the Drobopro with large volumes on Linux, I did the set of tests and found the exact same problems as the others, so submitted a bug report.
At least three people reported that particular bug over a few weeks and got replies.
Each reply claimed it was the first DR had heard of that bug…
I really like the Drobo and desperately hope they have fixed the bug in the latest (new) firmware, or do so in a (hopefully near) future release - but it is extremely worrying that the company is telling people that they are the only one with a problem when you know there have been multiple reports of that exact same bug.