Data Robotics this morning chased after more than just individual users with the DroboPro. The external array now has 8 SATA bays and can carry as much as 16TB of storage using current hard drive technology. It also expands Drobo's well-known automatic data redundancy by supporting the failure of as many as two disks at once and dynamically shuffling information as disks are added, removed or partitioned into new volumes.

The DroboPro is also the first Drobo to have Ethernet built-in and serve as network-attached storage, though it keeps both the single USB and dual FireWire 800 jacks of the more recent 4-bay Drobo. New to the pro version is support for iSCSI over the Ethernet connection that reportedly requires no configuration in Mac OS X or Windows and which is fast enough to be used for important applications.

Prices start at $1,299 for an empty model and scale up to as much as $3,999 for a fully-loaded 16TB edition. Data Robotics says its new enclosure should be available immediately in multiple countries.