Drobo has re-announced a 12 bay rackmount storage appliance.
The Drobo B1200i was first revealed back in Februrary as part of a new business focused lineup that includes the eight-bay B800fs and B800i.
The B1200i has twelve bays that accept 3.5" SATA, SAS or SS drives. The product is primarily focused at deployment as iSCSI storage and has three Gigabit Ethernet ports to support data connection and an additional Gigabit port for management.
The new NAS supports Drobo’s standard "Beyond RAID" technology that allows users to expand storage without dealing with configuring RAID levels or volumes.
It also includes "automated data-aware tiering" that is said to automatically optimally store data in rotating or SSD storage depending on how it is used. This basically boils down to directing small and random writes to SSD and large sequential files to SATA or SAS based storage.
B1200i pricing starts at under $10,000 for 12 TB of SAS storage, with availability "soon".