Drobo's intelligent storage has made something of a name for itself, and the company's B1200i is getting even better. The company just announced that the refreshed B1200i boosts performance by up to 300 percent over previous versions of the product, fueled by Drobo’s patent-pending automated data-tiering software and the unique hybrid use of solid state technology alongside traditional hard disk drives (SAS or SATA). The B1200i SSD is marketed as primary storage for up to 250 users or as Tier 2 storage and backup for departments in larger organizations. Existing B1200i customers can upgrade to the new performance and functionality via a free software download at http://www.drobo.com/support/updates.php.The ability of the B1200i SSD to automatically utilize a small number of SSDs alongside hard disk drives (HDDs) allows customers to enjoy the best of both storage worlds – the capacity of hard drives and the performance of SSD technology. Furthermore, the Drobo B1200i SSD has attained VMware Ready status with vSphere 5.0 certification, and cloud backup with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others is also supported.Naturally, this applies mostly to enterprise users, but it's usually not long before these high-end features trickle down to Drobo's consumer-friendly offerings.