Windows Home Server Announced
Yesterday at the CES, we announced the future availability of Windows Home Server, a new server designed to be the central digital nervous system for the home. I've been running Windows Home Server at home for about 3 months now and I tell you it's just about what I was looking for: centralized storage of music, photos, videos, software, computer backups. My hats off to the Windows Home Server team for bringing together some nifty techology to market.
Windows Home Server is super simple to operate. It's all setup to keep itself up to date with all the latest Windows security updates, so there's nothing to manage for the home owner. Turn it on, connect it to your network, and forget about it.
Adding storage to Windows Home Server couldn't be any more simple. Using either internal or external drives, simply attach the drive then use the Windows Home Server client to make the new drive available to the storage system. There's no RAID configuration to step through because Windows Home Server has its replication technology baked in. This technology enables the user to replace existing drives with larger ones as they become available. What's more is you can use any size drive when adding to your server.
At some point I'd love to see Windows Home Server become a centralized Media Center Server where I could outfit one (or more) servers with ample storage and TV tuners to record all our favorite shows and make them available throughout the house via Media Center Extenders (XBOX 360). As it stands now I can use Windows Media Connect to expose Music, Photos, and Videos to extender devices but no such luck for MCE recorded TV... though I suppose I could do this in a round about sort of way by converting the TV shows to MPEG but then I lose some of the rich meta-data and navigation options allowed for TV that is not available for Videos.
All in all though, I look forward to the final release Windows Home Server. It's been long in the making and definately something my household will benefit from!