Drobo Elite Performance Testing

I’ve had a Drobo Elite in my possession for way too long, and I would like to post this brief explanation of why I haven’t posted any test results yet.

A few reasons actually… here we go.

1. Our test environment uses an HP ProCurve switch that claims can do etherchannel or port trunking. Unfortunately our network admin and myself (both with more Cisco smarts than ProCurve experience) haven’t been able to get the damn thing to trunk anything to anything. We’ve even gone down the road of actually hooking up HP servers with HP NICs with HP networking software- and it still fails to trunk the two links. This will have a detrimental effect on our performance testing for the Elite so I’ve held off until we can get our hands on a 12, 24, or 48 port Cisco switch to replace this P.O.S. I seriously cannot convey the disappointment and lack of trust I have in this hardware – one of our campuses has a larger unit instead of a Cat6509 that we would have chosen, and it is just a nightmare in our environment.

2. The college that I work for is smack dab in the middle of an automotive manufacturer induced jobless zone and enrollment is up over 80% (yes, eighty percent). So as you can imagine resources have been stretched thin and students are (and always have been) our primary customer. This has reduced the amount of development and testing to an hour or so a week… and on projects that are more critical. The summer semester used to be great for large implementations, remodeling, and better parking spots. Not anymore.

3. On a team of three server and network engineers – two have had children in the last three months. My wife and I had a healthy baby boy in March and our other server engineer and his wife just had a healthy (albeit a few weeks early) baby boy. All are doing well and we’re all grateful and very humble by the experience. Seriously, ladies – how do you do it? I’m in awe… But the few hours after 5pm we used to have to test and play with new gear is all but gone for a while.

I watch the hits on this site, the search queries, and all the other data as I have time – and it looks like interest in this testing has not waned. So with Drobo’s continued support – we’re looking to obtain a Cisco switch and configure it to provide us the environment we need to properly test this little beasty very soon.

As always, comments are always welcome – as are emails directly to me.

-Jason ([@]) binaryspiral ([.])com