Two of EMC’s most recent promo videos focused specifically on scale-out NAS (network-attached storage), listing the five things enterprise should look for when choosing a solution.  Director Nick Kirsch, the presenter in these highlights, also dedicated a few minutes to the five warning signs customers should be looking out for, including a lack of the efficiency among other elements he listed during the earlier session.

Today, Sanbolic is hoping to live up to at least some of the standards set forth by the storage giant with its latest launch. ShareCenter is the latest addition to the company’s Melio Enterprise suite, and is a file serving module that’s designed to transform traditional Windows Server-powered boxes into a consolidated NAS environment.  The solution hopes to achieve these by adding a vendor-agnostic layer to a company’s deployment with instant provisioning capabilities.

It’s designed to work with Sanbolic’s other offerings. For one, scaling is supposedly made easier through a more centralized management interface for admins. This approach is pretty much the foundation of ShareCenter, based on this tidbit from the release:

“Granular Quality of Service (QoS) – provides a means by which to substantially improve the control of traffic and bandwidth – enables fast and efficient fine-tuning for more specific applications, environments and configurations; ensures consistent application performance and alignment with user-defined policies in physical and virtual environments.”

Sanbolic also promises to eliminate single points of failure with its latest product.

The storage industry has been ablaze with new developments lately. One of the more interesting advancements include Dell’s first acquisition in their software group with AppAssure, a maker of backup apps that is of obvious interest to the company’s storage unit even though it doesn’t tie in with hardware directly.