OK, I have an original Drobo and DroboShare. What I want and need is:
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A DroboShare that supports a higher speed connection between the Drobo and DroboShare (e.g. Firewire 800, USB 3.0, eSata) Obviously this requires a compatible Drobo
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DroboShare to support multiple NIC connections to the network, so if you connect it directly to a GIG switch, you could at the very least serve files to two different computers at the full Gigabit/sec of the network each (realizing the full speed of the network is never really achieved). Ideally if you had multiple NICs on the computer too, you could actually achieve the full throughput to that computer.
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Software that is fully supported that allows one droboshare/drobo combo to act as a lazy mirror of another droboshare/drobo over a wide area network, so one drobo backs up the other so you have cheap disaster recovery. In fact, if you had system A and B, ideally you could designate 1/2 of A as a working enviornment and 1/2 of A as a backup to B, and then do the reverse for B so I could actually share a drobo and backup with a friend/or other family member. I know there are solutions that come close to this if I hook the drobo up to my PC (like crashplan), but I want to set it up through software once, and then walk away from my droboshare/drobo and not have to think about it again, and I don’t want to have to keep a PC up and running 24/7 either. The “mirror” capability wouldn’t need to send every ‘transaction’ over the network, I would be ok with a scheduled backup rather than true mirroring, but again, set up once and forget about it and always be confident I have an offsite backup of my Drobo. Actually, I would even be fine if the target for the backup was a simple NAS or hard drive connected to the droboshare and not a full drobo (meaning no pseudo RAID). The source would of course have to be a full drobo.
So come on Drobo, when are you going to come out with these?