According to Drobo CEO Tom Buiocchi, "A funny thing happened when we introduced the Drobo B1200i in November last year. A lot of big companies started to buy it." We always think of Drobo customers as small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) and perhaps departments in larger organizations. But when we saw more and more large companies start buying Drobo business products, we took a closer look, asked a few more questions, and tried to understand why.

It turns out that they all have Tier I storage from big suppliers such as Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, and NetApp. A lot of it actually. They buy more every year. It works very well but is also quite expensive. The interesting thing that we discovered is that they don’t need Tier I storage for 100% of their data. If you believe what the analysts say, less than 25% of corporate data actually requires Tier I storage¹, so a lot of these big companies use Drobo as the
"other SAN" for the rest of their data. Read more in Tom's blog post.

1. “The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe,” An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth, ID.