Drobo's storage devices for businesses, in a nutshell, offer or storage for PCs, Macs, or servers. Machines connected to the storage units are backed up automatically on a schedule that the user designates.

When one of the disks in the (a combination of either a configuration) goes bad, a red warning light goes off on the Drobo unit. You can then swap a new drive for the bad one as the storage device, which is small enough to sit on a desktop, continues to run with Drobo's BeyondRAID technology.

Company representatives say the storage devices can be setup in just a few minutes with what they say is a "five-click" installation process. If you have 10 office PCs that you want to connect to one of the storage devices, you run the setup wizard from the install DVD from a PC connected to the Drobo unit. The idea, company reps say, is that a SoHo user or even someone who has no interest in networks can manage the process. If something goes wrong, Drobo offers a hotline for 24/7 customer support.

You can run the Drobo Dashboard from a workstation that attaches to a Drobo unit. The software console displays capacity and disk status information and can be used as a management tool for tasks such as copying data from the Drobo unit.

The professional-grade devices Drobo is launching come in different flavors. The 8-bay model B800fs is a NAS device that offers file sharing for up to 100 users. Model B800i is an eight-bay iSCSI SAN unit that can accommodate up to eight servers. While models B800fs and B800i are available now, the B1200i, which is a 12-bay iSCSI SAN device, will be available in the second quarter.