Data Robotics, the makers of Drobo today announced the launch of DroboShare, a companion for Drobo that enables users to easily share files over a Local Area Network (LAN). With this release, the company is building on its mission to change the way people store, manage and share their digital assets.

In June 2007 Data Robotics unveiled Drobo, the world's first data storage robot, bringing to market a new way to eliminate the time-consuming chore of storage management. The product took home 11 prestigious industry awards and accolades in 2007, including several “Best-in-Class” products for the year. Today's release of DroboShare significantly increases the value and functionality that Drobo brings by providing home or business users with a simple way to share data without the complexity normally associated with Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices or RAID storage systems.

"The recognition we've received by users and peers over the last eight months has been astonishing," said Geoff Barrall, CEO and co-founder of Data Robotics. "This tells us that Drobo is truly addressing a need in the industry and we've accomplished our goal of redefining the storage experience. This next release – and the ability to share the Drobo and housed data via a LAN – is the culmination of user input and shows the importance that our company places on the feedback of our customers."

With DroboShare, users can now access the information stored on the award-winning Drobo from any client on the network, including Windows, Apple or Linux computers, as well as other networked devices like Home Media Centers. And unlike other NAS desktop storage devices the Drobo and DroboShare solution embraces ease of use and flexibility by being the first NAS solution that supports all major file systems (NTFS, HFS+, EXT3, FAT32). Additionally, Drobo has the flexibility to be easily disconnected from DroboShare and then connected directly to a host computer as required.

Features of this solution include:

• All of the benefits of the Drobo storage robot including complete data safety, simple expansion, no down-time and minimum
  
  
• Flexibility to directly attach Drobo when you need to and network attach it when you want to
  
  
• Gigabit Ethernet support
  
  
• Auto-mounting on Windows and OS X (no configuration or maintenance regardless of your connection choice
  
  
• Support for all major file systems including NTFS (Windows), HFS+ (Apple OS X), EXT3 (Linux) and FAT32 (various)
  
  
• Support today for 8TB of storage, scaling to 32TB as larger disk drives become available

Drobo and DroboShare are available today and can be purchased worldwide from an extensive network of over 500 valued partners. In the United States, Drobo retails for $499 and DroboShare retails for $199.

Drobo and DroboShare will also be on display in the Data Robotics Booth in the Developer Pavilion, West Hall at Macworld – booth #4629

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