In an effort to keep up (and possibly even surpass) other feature-rich NAS devices, such as the Synology DS107+ or the HP MV2120, Drobo Robotics today released to the Drobo Developer Community (DDC) the beta SDK for its ever popular Drobo products including Drobo, the external hard drive, and DroboShare, the network storage add-on.

The 18MB SDK includes a special firmware version for DroboShare that provides support for installing third-party applications and a sample application, which is an open-source UPnP Media Server. This means once installed, the DroboShare will allow UPnP-enabled devices, like Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, to access and play multimedia content stored on the Drobo external hard drive. Going forward, the SDK will support more standards and types of applications including: iTunes Music Server, Rsync, FTP, Web, Squeeze Center, and so on.

In addition to supporting DroboShare, the SDK comes with extras for the Drobo external hard drive. Immediately available with this release are a Linux version Drobo Dashboard and a utility that allows Windows to show Drobo's actual storage size. Going forward, you will be able to even create certain manipulations to the Drobo's hardware, such as changing the usage of the Drobo's LED lights.

You can register to be a member of DDC and download the beta SDK right now and start further robotizing the Drobo your own way.