Adventures in Drobo-land, upgrading to a Drobo 5N

This is a false statement. The RAID subsystems used in linux (both of them) are not proprietary and you can move the drives from one vendor’s hardware and software to another. I have moved a RAID 1+0 array from an intel-mobo Centos server to a Tyan-mobo Mediabuntu server without difficulty.

There are other open-source RAID implementations, I am sure. I think what you meant to say was that none of the proprietary implementations are standardized or interoperable.