The Windows Home Server World Cup results for May are in and Norway remains on top and extends its lead over its competition. They look like they are going to be hard to catch, as it seems that the Norwegians understand the power of benefits of Windows Home Server and continue to bring it into their homes at a rapid pace. New Zealand and the USA are still in the #2 and #3 spots, and Denmark made a huge surge to secure the 4th spot as time is running down. Canada is now in the top 8, with less than 30 days left in Microsoft's fiscal year. The standings are:
The standings are computed by taking Windows Home Server sales divided by the number of households with a broadband connection in each country. Updated standings will be published next month.
Another great story about WHS backup saving the day...this time in the case of burglary. From Mike Frank's blog post titled "WHS Eases My Suffering:"
Essentially a person (or a couple people) broke into my house, rifled through everything, and took as much as they could carry (so it seems). The item taken of interest here is my main desktop. This was the machine I used daily for everything from playing games to doing my home finances to research for work. My lifeline at home. One thing they didn't take was the ugly looking machine in the closet which is, you guessed it, my WHS. There is an advantage to building your WHS as a Frankenstein looking machine: it's ugly enough thieves don't want it. What this means is that even though my desktop hardware is gone I haven't lost any data. The machine was backing itself up the the WHS daily. In a time of stress this was a nice piece of the puzzle I just didn't have to worry about.
Goes to show that looks aren't everything...
J
Computex Taipei has become the largest technology exhibition in Asia and second largest in the world. (Trivia buffs: CeBIT in Germany is the largest) The expected Computex attendance is a staggering 270,000 visitors! This show attracts people from across the computer industry and it should come as no surprise that Microsoft is participating. What may be more interesting for readers of this blog is that the Windows Home Server team is attending this year. Taiwan is an important region for research and production facilities and Windows Home Server is working with many local hardware and software companies to drive innovative digital home solutions. Here's a peak at some of the Windows Home Server activities happening at Computex.
Windows Home Server is featured prominently in the Microsoft booth. Today was a "technology buyer only" day at Computex. Tomorrow the show opens to all attendees and the booth traffic will be hectic.
Windows Home Server was featured prominently in the keynote presentation "The Digital rEvolution" (spelling oddity by design) by Steven Guggenheimer, Microsoft Corporate Vice President OEM Division. I have not seen any videos posted yet but I can assure you the product demonstration was good. The HP MediaSmart Server was displayed on the stage. (Sorry for the picture quality, I was seated pretty far back from the stage.)
Watch for more dispatches from the team this week!
Steven
Have you seen Edgar Voorbraak's Home Server toaster yet? Imaginative, cool, funny...just like the Home Server community, in general.
Here are the specs. Home Server Hacks has more info and pics.
Microsoft storage guru and 'gamer dad' Jason Buffington has a great post on the popular Xbox Dad blog about using WHS with Xbox.
He cites the Windows Home Server documentation on media sharing, as well as the section of the Xbox.com site devoted to connecting your Xbox 360 to Windows Media (including Home Server).
Jason's blog, All Backed Up, is where he regularly documents his WHS experience, as well Xbox and storage insights.
Microsoft's Windows Home Server web site is getting updated to enable people to quickly find what they are looking for with fewer clicks. We did an extensive review of the site statistics and search terms and are making changes to the site to better serve both general consumers and enthusiasts.
Check out the updated site design at http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeServer
Any ideas of how to make it better, please feel free to comment.... thx in advance.
t.
Today' story came from a gentleman named Bruce...
I got up Saturday morning and went into my office with a morning snack. The first thing I noticed was a “WwrrrrrrWrrrrrrWrrrrr” coming from my office, something didn’t sound quite right. When I opened the door, I was greeted with “ABIT Bios”, System disk not found. I used to work for hp, writing disk drive firmware and I know a bad spindle when I hear one. Sure enough it was my main system drive. Dead. But I had hope…
Awhile ago, I had set up a home server, and already it had saved my wife’s e-mail from oblivion. She had accidently lost her .pst file when transferring from her desktop PC to a notebook, and I was able to restore it from the home server and save all her contact information. I seem to remember some kind of emergency disk in the home server box. Hmmmmmm.
I went down to office max, and I found a new hard disk that morning. By 10am, I had it installed. I rebooted from the emergency restore disk in the home server box, and was able to easily format the new drive. It showed me that I had a backup from 1:15 Saturday morning on the server, so I selected it, and the new drive. It started restoring. There were several hundred GB of data to be restored, so I left it to its task. I checked its progress at dinner time, and it was complete. I had to do a small fix to make everything bootable again, but once it restated, everything was back to normal! No data loss. All my apps worked.
Windows Home Server has been a great user experience for me and my family. Everyone in the house uses it. The installation was incredibly simple and clean. The features are simple and powerful, and the backup works like a dream.
If you would like an autographed hard copy version (only 500 were made) of the "Mommy, Why is there a Server in the House?" book, then you need to head over to the HomeServerHacks web site. http://www.homeserverhacks.com/2008/05/mommy-why-is-there-server-in-house.html
Interested in participating in the beta program for Windows Home Server Power Pack 1? We need your help! You are encouraged to sign up and install the latest build of Windows Home Server from https://connect.microsoft.com/windowshomeserver in preparation for the Power Pack 1 download. Additional information on how to prepare a home server for testing the beta of Power Pack 1 is outlined on the Microsoft Connect site.
The Power Pack 1 download is planned to be available in early June. We intend to allow for adequate time for feedback and thorough testing during the beta process. The timeline for a final release will depend on feedback and testing, in order to deliver a fix of the highest quality. Thanks for your support!
The Windows Home Server Team
Good to see Tranquil's T2 WHS A3 Harmony Home Server - "more substantial" vs. the T7 HSA - is a recommended product on PC Pro's "A List."
"...this machine is passively cooled throughout; the only noise is of the hard disk spinning. It's also appealingly efficient....well built and well conceived."
Terry ran it thru its paces back in December, of course.
I don't write these, I just receive them in my e-mail, and I figured it would be good to start sharing them with a wider audience. This one came from a Microsoft employee named Jason, the title of the blog is the subject line of the e-mail. Here is the text of the message:
OK. For all the crap I've been giving you guys for not having every feature I wanted, today I must laud you with praise. As advertised, the WHS just totally saved me from hours of work. For whatever reason, my wife's primary computer got a corrupt system profile yesterday, effectively "losing everything" from her perspective: outlook config, desktop files, documents, etc. I dropped the PC Restore CD in the drive and watched tentatively as it walked smoothly through a very straight-forward and simple process to let me select my system, the drives I wanted to restore, and then it took about 20 minutes to get us right back to the perfect state we were in on Sunday.
Thanks for making a perfect backup and restore user experience! I don't think that could have been easier or better.
The Windows Home Server World Cup results for April are in and Norway remains on top, with New Zealand closing the gap. New Zealand is less than 100 units away from first place, assuming Norway stands still. Windows Home Server has now been sold in 47 different countries around the world. The top 8 countries are:
The Windows Home Server team has solved a software bug that may affect files that are compressed using Advanced Attributes (NTFS compression). NTFS compression can be enabled on an individual file, folder or at the hard drive level and is sometimes enabled by users to save disk space on a home computer. More information on the bug and a link to download the fix at KB950190.
You can visit the Windows Home Server Community Forums if you want to ask questions or discuss this issue, by accessing this thread.
Sometimes we find stories about Windows Home Server on other people's blogs, sometimes we miss them. Clint Rutkas had the misfortune of having his laptop stolen ... you can read his blog post here. The summation, "Windows Home Server, best 400 dollars I ever spent."
One of the important benefits of Windows Home Server is "image-based backup". Most consumers are probably not aware of this important distinction when it comes to backup. A disk image backup is basically a backup of the entire hard drive. Contrast that with "file-based backup" which is the backup of selective files on the hard drive.
Personal story: This past weekend my wife decided to download a few fonts from the web. For some inexplicable reason a few of the files, that were conveniently saved on the Windows desktop, would not delete after she tried them out in Microsoft Word. "Cannot delete file: It is being used by another person or program." I was called in to solve the problem. After a few searches on the web, I came to the realization that finding a solution could become a significant time investment. Instead, I pulled out the Windows Home Server Computer Restore CD. I left the computer to complete the system restoration and when I returned an hour later it was done. Everything was back to normal!
The time savings associated with Windows Home Server is an often overlooked advantage. Since the sun was shining this weekend in Seattle, those time savings were all the more valuable to me!
Does Donavon West sleep or has his home server automated a bunch of previously manual tasks so that he has time to write cool sidebar gadgets that interface with Windows Home Server?
His new one is called "ShareMaster for Home Server" and sits on the sidebar allowing quick access to WHS shared folders.
Go to http://www.homeserverhacks.com - Thanks Donavon!
Donavon West of Home Server Hacks and LiveGadgets.net has created a nice Home Server blog headline ticker gadget to help you get the WHS news you can use. Pretty slick - it currently pulls from this blog, We Got Served, MS Windows Home Server and Home Server Hacks.
Doing my duty to point out the 'hot' deals on our OEM Windows Home Server products, here's one to take note of...
Given credit where it's due, the kind folks on Home Server Hacks have pointed to an interesting promotion by New Egg - the HP MediaSmart Server for $539 WITH a free router + free shipping AND a free extra 500 GB hard drive. Details here.
WHAT A DEAL! ;-)
- MFP
Interesting story here on CE Pro about Atomoo, which "may be the first residential IT managed services company to cater to home systems integrators." And they rely on Home Server.
Home systems integrators may do a good job of installing PCs and networks in their customers’ homes, but they really don’t want to maintain those systems.....Atomoo provides 24 x7 IT support for residential customers. At the customers’ premises is a Windows Home Server loaded with remote management and diagnostics software.
I was in Dallas last week for the SMB Summit, where 400+ solution provider partners were gearing up for the Windows Essential Server Solutions launching later this year and learning about Home Server, too. At lunch several attendees told me how they see Home Server as way to expand their consulting businesses into the high end home market.
As the 'new guy' on the Home Server team, I've been waiting a bit to find the right topic to jump into the blogging spotlight. When I ran across some really interesting power consumption data that Fujitsu-Siemens, one of our OEM partners in Europe had sent us, I just couldn't resist...
First, a quick intro: my role on the team is helping our OEM and ISV partners bring Windows Home Server products and services to market...So you'll likely be hearing a lot from me in the future in terms of really cool new additions to the Home Server ecosystem.
But back to my original point...With energy prices rising across the world, it's pretty clear that all of us will be paying a lot more attention to how we consume power in our houses - especially those devices that we tend to leave 'on' more than others - like PCs, A/V equipment, and of course our trusty Windows Home Servers. ;-) One of our partners, Fujitsu-Siemens (or FSC for short) opted to differentiate their Windows Home Server offering, the FSC Scaleo, by focusing on reducing power consumption thru innovative software and a great hardware platform. The results from their lab, below, speak for themselves. I've compared their results with an average PC in the home (and yes, I used the 'extreme' example here to prove a point). This translates into real, significant $$ folks!
Clearly, I'm not the only one that's recognized the 'green' angle of the FSC Home Server product. PC Pro, a UK based tech magazine just posted this review lauding its ability to conserve energy: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/190008/fujitsu-siemens-scaleo-home-server-1900.html
Power Consumption Comparison
FSC Scaleo Windows Home Server*
Average Home PC**
Power usage/day
433.06 Wh or 0.433 KwH
5040 Wh or 5.04 KwH
Power usage/year (kwH)
158.264
1839.6
Cost / KwH in Germany (Euros)
0.2
Cost / year (using today's exchange rate)
31.65
or $50.35 US
367.92 or $585.29 US
That's less than 10% of avg. PC power cost!
!!!
* FSC Home Server using their power consumption software
** Source: Overclockers.com - Avg. computer system draws 210 watts with no power saving settings enabled and left on for 24 hours.
The Consumer Electronics Association has issued a new study that shows (yet again) that Americans are not backing up their digital photos, music, documents or other types of files. Results of the study, "Amassing Digital Fortunes: A Digital Storage Study," show that nearly one in three consumers don't see the need to back up their files, while nearly a quarter (22%) say they aren't backing up files because it's too time-consuming. The average U.S. adult has 1,800 digital files, totaling 310 billion digital files nationwide. With an additional 1,060 being added per user in 2008, the total number is expected to hit just under 500 billion by the end of the year.
Enter WHS backup and restore. We continually get emails and posts on the Forum like this:
This weekend, my wife was working on a spreadsheet when she sorted the columns accidentally and messed everything up. She went too far and couldn't undo it. She was a bit upset.
I installed a HP Home Server several weeks ago and it's been backing up all 5 computers in the house. Thanks to the Home Server, I was able to pull a backup from the night before and restore it.
My wife was elated and the Glendale Quilt Guild Show was saved!
The complete study is available free to CEA members. Nonmembers may buy the study at eBrain.org.
j
I saw this come through the transom and thought I'd share...a guy in Kuwait custom building a big Home Server (11 drives?!) with an Alienware case. Maybe he'll help move Kuwait up in the Home Server World Cup standings.
Industry analyst firm In-Stat is promoting its new consumer storage research by Joyce Putscher, who we speak with regularly. See the press release for a quick summary of the report. The consumer storage market has more than doubled in the last two years - no great surprise there. Putscher notes that Home Server partners - primarily traditional PC vendors at this point - will drive customer education. As we all know, home servers are more than storage devices...but good to see that another industry pundit believes WHS will help drive customer awareness about how to survive their "digital data deluge."
Lots of buzz lately for the Fujitsu-Siemens SCALEO Home Server. The German PC Magazine just gave it a great review, for example. We Got Served provides a very in-depth review of the product, comparing it with HP's MediaSmart Server. Worth a read. Terry calls SCALEO a "strong contender" with "beauty that comes from within." (Great to see Terry is boosting his karma here in the Great Northwest, too.)
What is one sign that a consumer product is making its way into the public consciousness? How about coverage in Playboy magazine? Yep, the HP MediaSmart Server is part of a feature on media room solutions. Sorry, I'm not providing a link to that site :)
The March numbers are in for the Windows Home Server World Cup. Norway and New Zealand remain strong in the #1 and #2 spots. Germany moved up to take the 4th slot away from the UK. Japan is back in the top 16, edging out China for the 16th spot. Here are the current rankings of the top 16 seeds in the Windows Home Server World Cup competition.