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Drobo Announces 'What Would You Do With 100 Drobos?' Contest Success

Drobo 'What Would You Do With 100 Drobos?' Contest Winner, GoodMakers Films, Shares Drobos With Charitable Causes in Africa (January 24, 2013)

SAN JOSE, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 01/24/13 -- Drobo, makers of award-winning data storage products for businesses and professionals, today revealed how GoodMakers Films, a winner of last year's "100 Drobos" contest, is using its Drobos. GoodMakers is devoted to increasing charity impact through short documentary films that help encourage donations and provide exposure to worthwhile causes in Africa and the U.S. The non-profit organization deploys Drobo external hard drives in its U.S. studio. At no cost to the groups they work with, the studio produces videos that can increase donations often to 10 times the cost of producing the video. GoodMakers also donated many Drobo devices to the charities it supports to help enable valuable record keeping and protection.

"We could not fulfill our mission without the support and generosity from Drobo," said Cris Blyth, founder of GoodMakers Films. "We work with multiple charities throughout the world and no organization we worked with had data properly backed up. They simply could not afford to spend a substantial amount of money on mass storage. Most struggled with typical hard drives daisy chained together, which would quickly fill up without an option to expand. Whether it was a doctor who built a hospital in Tanzania that needed to back up patient records, or orphanages struggling to build their computer labs; providing them all with proper backup storage through Drobo has made a huge impact on building their organizations and thus changing lives."

"Our goal for the '100 Drobos' project was to support non-profit organizations that are making original and compelling contributions to improve education, foster the arts and change the world," said Tom Buiocchi, CEO of Drobo. "GoodMakers Films fulfills that goal not only via the films it makes to support charities, but also by donating 25 of the Drobos it received to non-profits that would not otherwise be able to store the films they create or bring them to a wider audience."

In its Los Angeles studio, GoodMakers uses a professional grade Drobo for its main storage pool and archiving onto 16 drives. The organization was even able to put old drives into the Drobo unit to create a long-term archive system. Another Drobo provides storage for an editing workstation; this unit recently saved a film that was in the middle of production when the main OSX boot drive failed.

"Our Drobos have been on night and day since we installed them and I've been staggered by how robust they are," said Blyth. "We were working on one of our overseas projects and a storm rolled in. While the Drobo was busy rebuilding data into a new drive, a lightning strike fried the UPS the Drobo was connected to. When the storm cleared and we plugged in the Drobo, we were expecting complete failure at worst or significant data loss at best. We got neither: the Drobo booted back up and continued to rebuild itself as if nothing had happened."

GoodMakers has also shipped Drobos to charities in the U.S. and Africa to help them produce films that shine a light on their problems and needs:

Kilimanjaro Film Institute: Institute trains Tanzanian youth for employment in the film industry
Hot Sun Films: Award-wining company trains youth in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya
FAME Africa: Non-profit organization provides medical care in rural Tanzania
Rift Valley Children's Village: Orphanage cares for children in Tanzania
Non-profit documentary film 'Happy': Award-winning film goes around the world to explore what makes people happy

To learn more about GoodMakers Films and the charities it supports, visit www.goodmakersfilms.org.

About Drobo
Drobo makes award-winning data storage products that provide an unprecedented combination of sophisticated data protection and management features, affordable capacity, and ease of use. Based on the patented and proven BeyondRAID™ technology, Drobo delivers "Big Storage in a Small Box" creates the best storage experience ever for hundreds of thousands of SMBs and individual professionals worldwide, who use it to support their file backup and media archiving, server virtualization, and email application needs. To learn more, visit the Drobo website or visit the Drobo Blog follow us on Twitter @drobo.

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Media Contact:
Michelle Reingold
Trainer Communications for Drobo
(925) 271-8214
drobo@trainercomm.com

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