Recently I setup a SAN at my office to handle file sharing and data storage and replace our current file server with a more scalable solution. Getting this configured wasn’t so bad, however getting migrated to the solution is still in the coming “soon” stage of planning.

So in the past few weeks I have been playing with the new EMC Celerra that my company purchased. As of right now I can say that creating CIFS servers and sharing storage is pretty straight forward. Other areas, not so much.

Recently I got a Celerra NX4 storage array to meet my organizations storage needs, or out of the box, solve a specific problem that we are having with regard to storage. Slow data performance across the network and Windows Update. I found out quickly by doing some simple math covering what exists today and the maximum amount of available storage on the NX4 (~900GB) that this move to SAN Storage would indeed be something that has multiple phases (read disk shelves).

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.