Drobo parent company StorCentric shifts to Chapter 7 bankruptcy

AppleInsider

StorCentric has shifted to Chapter 7 bankruptcy after failing to find a buyer or reorganize its company after COVID-19, leaving Drobo and Retrospect customers without any information.

Drobo could cease to exist thanks to Chapter 7 filing

Drobo and Retrospect are backup solution vendors with combined decades in the industry. Their parent company, StorCentric, has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy after COVID-19 disrupted its business.

In July, StorCentric filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which would enable the company to restructure and save its assets, perhaps selling off to a bigger entity. Since then, the company hasn't been able to find a buyer or recover, so a full liquidation and selloff is all that's left for the company.

There isn't any publicly available information about this move yet, but AppleInsider was tipped off about the event. The tipster says they've received an email from StorCentric stating the Chapter 11 bankruptcy was shifting to Chapter 7 on April 28, 2023.

StorCentric, Drobo, and Retrospect don't show any information about this on their websites. There isn't any information provided about what existing customers should do, but we expect they should look for other solutions.

A message on the Drobo website says that as of January 27, Drobo support and products are no longer available. There is no indication of what will happen to Drobo or its assets in the liquidation.

StorCentric has a lot of high-profile customers

Generally, when businesses file for Chapter 7, their assets are sold off piece by piece to pay debts. Drobo and Retrospect could survive intact sold to a new company, or be divided up into smaller pieces and shifted around.

This is an evolving situation, and AppleInsider will provide more details as we learn more.

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mobird

I wonder if OWC/Mac Sales gave this any consideration?

lordjohnwhorfin

Guess they had no backup plan…

KTR

I use to sell those drives  prior to 2014.  They were good.  Lots of clients will get hurt.  I was planning on getting one.

twitty-whitty

Maaaaannn…. I’ve got to say.  Drobo gave me a lot of heartburn when I lost my RAID 5 array and their support told me the recommended course of action was to rebuild from scratch.  Or as a friend reminded me today,  restore from a backup. Good grief and good riddance, Drobo.  

My gut response and feelings on this matter reminds me of a scene from the Big Lebowski … when John Goodman beating the crap out of a Corvette. LOL I guess karma played out.

Retrospect_Support

Retrospect is still open (under a new parent company). We never stopped supporting customers or selling Retrospect. Our distributors and resellers are actively selling our back-up solutions and the product is still in development.

Robin
Director, Retrospect Support. 

DavidEsrati

It's sad that Drobo is dying. We had 3 of them- and used them for centralized file storage and for video editing.
The hot swappable feature- as well as being able to use different sized drives was really helpful.
They stopped working reliably with 10.13 or so.
The sad thing is OWC's Thunderbay's have been glitchy as all all get out. They blamed Apple - until an update today, was supposed to fix it.

I don't know why Apple ditched server in the first place- and didn't buy Drobo and improve it- it was really userfriendly- and reliable.
We've had to build a linux server running TRUnas as a solution and NextCloud as a way to replace all the canceled Apple Server services.
Not in love with it.
Not in love with Apple as much as I used to be either.
Calling anything of theirs "pro" lately is an insult- although returning some ports to macbook pros is a good start.

formerlyDavidH

A brief word about Nexsan, the StorCentric-owned NAS manufacturer that is not Drobo. That company appears to be a survivor, and it looks as if it's taking charge of the client-server backup software company. Nexsan doesn't have the same marketing target that Drobo had:

For over 20 years Nexsan has built a reputation for highly reliable, cost-effective storage designed to serve specific use cases and business demands. Nexsan products are “purpose-built” rather than built for general purpose. That means product design starts by understanding the diverse workloads in customers’ environments. IT professionals can depend on Nexsan for cost-effective block storage for backup, databases or Exchange, scalable and highly flexible NAS file systems or secure archiving. Purpose-built storage with innovation that matters, reliability, and pricing to fit constrained budgets. Nexsan has a solution for you.

The reason Nexsan seems to be taking charge of Retrospect "Inc." is that Retrospect is incorporated in two of its product lines.

As for the first product line, the high-end Nexsan Unity's

object-based storage uses MinIO. MinIO provides an open-source, scalable storage service for secure on-premise data protection on a Nexsan Unity system. With its Object Lock capabilities, MinIO enables customers to lock specific files for a retention period, such that no one, not even the root user on the account, can delete the files until the time has passed.
... Retrospect integrates seamlessly with this new object lock feature. Users can set a retention period for backups stored on supporting cloud platforms. Within this immutable retention period, backups cannot be deleted by any user, even if ransomware or a malicious actor acquires the root credentials. [The backup software]’s powerful policy-based scheduling allows it to predict when those backups will leave the retention policy and protect any files that will no longer be retained, ensuring businesses always have point-in-time backups to restore within the immutable retention policy window.

AFAIK, the addition of Object Lock to MiniO was actually done by a Missouri-based marketer of Retrospect.

As for the second Nexsan product line—the lower-end Nexsan EZ-NAS,

StorCentric®, a data-centric security company, offering a comprehensive portfolio of secure data management solutions, today announced the general availability (GA) launch of Nexsan EZ-NAS, network attached storage (NAS). Featuring an easy to configure 1U form factor and four drives with up to 72 TB of raw capacity and 1.5 GB/s of throughput, the new EZ-NAS array is ideal for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises’ edge deployments.

The Nexsan EZ-NAS platform delivers advanced enterprise-class features such as in-line compression, AD support and data-at-rest encryption. EZ-NAS also comes with the Retrospect software for optional add-on services, including data backup, cloud connector and ransomware anomaly detection.