One of the more challenging things about storage is the amount of data that individual departments or classes of workers are trying to manipulate. It's increasingly becoming routine for these departments to store terabytes of data, and naturally, they all want IT support when it comes to managing that data.

Unfortunately, most IT departments today have their hands full just dealing with corporate data, never mind all the data being generated by any number of business units or departments. What this means is that IT is looking for departmental level storage solutions that can be easily managed at the local level in order to make sure that high-priced enterprise storage solutions are used to support mission-critical applications.

That's what is likely to make a new DroboPro storage system from Data Robotics a pretty interesting step towards making individual departments self-sufficient when it comes to storage, The DroboPro can be used to allocate up to 16TB of storage across a pool of applications. The DroboPro does this by leveraging a Beyond RAID storage technology that Data Robotics initially developed for consumer applications. Now the company is applying the same concepts to departmental and small-to-medium business applications.

Customers can mix and match any type of drive in the system, so for instance any type of 1TB or 2TB drive can be used in the system. This means customers can readily take advantage of changing storage economics as new disk drives come on the market. The Drobo Professional accomplishes this because the intelligence in the system sees every new drive being added to the system as just another physical drive to be allocated to the larger virtual pool for storage. Data is then allocated across all the drives in the array, which will automatically provide failover support for each other in the event of a drive failure.

The DroboPro can be attached to any system using an iSCSI, FireWire or USB connection with prices ranging from $1,299 to $3,999. When you think about all the cost of labor usually associated with enterprise-class storage, the DroboPro might just pay for itself in week by freeing IT people up to do more than just manage the storage requirements of individual departments.

Data Robotics has already sold more than 60,000 storage systems, mostly into the consumer market. With the advent of the DroboPro, the odds are good that these systems are going to increasingly find their way into enterprise organizations that today are looking for any edge they can find to hold back the deluge of data bubbling up to the data center from every corner of the enterprise.