Tranquil PC Windows Home Server 2011 Hardware to use DriveBender

Today we talked about beta 3 of DriveBender for Windows Home Server 2011, and now we can reveal that Tranquil PC will be using DriveBender with its Leo HS4 and Leo SS4 servers instead of DriveHarmony from DataCore.

Originally Tranquil were planning on shipping their servers with the DataCore DriveHarmony product, however this has now changed.

This is what Tranquil told us:

DataCore, of Florida, have an innovative solution for Home Servers 2011. They have expert knowledge in virtualised disk management. DriveHarmony has been tested by Tranquil. The Add In runs a sort of ‘soft RAID’. Adding HDDs to the ‘pool’ is straight forward (except that the first HDD can’t be used at all). Choosing to build a ‘protected’ pool means the use of ‘paired’ HDDs. Remembering that HDD1 (incl the OS partition) can’t be included in the ‘pool’ or a ‘protected pool’, sadly forced our engineers to look further.

So now they are looking at DriveBender:

The specialised ‘driver’ company in Australia have also been working hard to develop a data / disk management system. As they do not have the heavy legacy of the two previous companies they, like Tranquil, can bring new concepts to the table, and put in huge efforts to complete designs. Sometimes a fast, lean organisation is needed to listen and implement the needs of it’s customers (quickly).

As the company is ‘aligned’ to Home Server, they understand the need of the customer “a product as near to, and as good as the original Drive Extender”.

Another important function is the ability for HDDs in a protected or unprotected pool to be able to be read ‘outside’ of the server (ie on a PC). DB uses standard NTFS systems, which ensures that Data can be easily recovered, from a single HDD (Data Transit).

The product (now at Beta3) is nearing it’s pre-production phase, and is looking very good. Performance is also very good. In it’s final version the product will be very much like DE – simply adding mixed sizes of HDDs to a pool, and then determining which ‘folders’ should be protected. It may not have the complex virtualisation functions behind the scenes that DriveHarmony may ultimately offer, or the simple hardware RAID that the Intel RST may have on specific hardware platforms – but as far as we can see – it will deliver the best ‘all round’ package – Performance, Reliability, Data Transit.

Current plans are that Tranquil will work further with DriveBender, towards a customised version of the Add In for Leo HS4 and Leo SS4 Servers.

So, it looks like DriveBender has become the add-in of choice for Tranquil.