Windows Home Server Or What Is The Price of Peace of Mind?
Did you already hear about Windows Home Server? Well, maybe not. Let me give you a brief explanation as to what Windows Home Server is and why you want so it!
Windows Home Server (WHS) is a new member of the expanding Windows Server family. It's a product specifically targeting home users with broadband access to the Internet and more than 2 PC's that are networked. WHS is based on Windows Server and is designed to be very, very easy to administer. So much so that using words like administer, manage, and server would give you and home PC users in general the wrong impression. In fact, you should check out the Hewlett-Packerd WHS, it doesn't have a VGA or a keyboard connector, it is clearly design as a No-touch server. And it's SMALL, about the width of a 2.5" harddrive and twice the height of a soda can, even though it will hold up to 4TB (4 drives).
But I'm getting ahead of myself, let me explain why you want it by explaining to you how I am using the beta version of WHS in my house.
My family consists of 4 people (my wife, our 18-year old son, our 3-year old son, and me). Today we have 3 PC's: our oldest son has one, we have a MediaCenter PC in the living room, and my wife and I share one (that is placed in our home office).
A year or so ago, I set up a server using an old PC, bought a serial ATA RAID controller card and 4 250GB hard drives, and installed Windows Server on it. The main purpose was to buy me peace of mind. Backing up the 80GB of digital pictures and documents on our PC's was driving me mad, and worrying that the CD based solution I was using wasn't effective enough!
I set the server up with a boot drive and setup the 4 SATA drives in a RAID 5 configuration to maximize the speed of accessing the data on the server as well as ensuring that I wouldn't loose data.
As the server worked well as a backup solution, and as I had plenty of storage left on the server, I started to make the server the central storage device for everything. It continued to be the backup for all our documents, but it also became our movie server.
At a certain point late last summer, I decided that I needed to upgrade the server as it was starting to show it's age. At that point I started to hear that we were going to build a server product for home use (yeah, initially I thought it was a preposterous idea, too). But as the concept was explained a demonstrated to me, I warmed up the the idea that this would indeed solve some of my problems, without adding new ones.
the two thing that really sold me on the idea was the centralized backup and the expandability of the storage solution in WHS.
The fact that I could install the backup client of each of our PC's, set it up to backup certain things, and know that I would have access to every version of every document and picture on our PC's from a central location, without me doing ANYTHNG, is the one thing that I really, really appreciate about WHS. Plus the fact that the software allows me to do restore of individual files or full system restore. The backup of all the PC's happens at night, every night.
The other feature I liked is the implementation of the storage in WHS. It is based on how IBM's midrange mainframes (AS400) did storage a long time ago.The concept is very simple: You add as many physical drives to the server (SATA, eSATA, USB, FireWire, etc) and you can then add those to the storage pool as either data or server backup. To the users the server now had one, very big drive.
The only place you can see the actual drives is in the administration console. You can ask WHS to "protect" an individual directory/folder by marking it in the console, this will cause WHS to duplicate the content of that folder to a different physical drive. A very simple, and very intuitive solution compared to the RAID5 system that I had previously. Now I can ask the server to protect only the data that needs protecting.
Another couple of feature that I enjoy (although not as much as the as the two first) are:
Remote administration over the Internet and media sharing through Windows Media Connect.
Remote administration allows me to access the server from anyplace on the planet Earth over the Internet in a secure manner. Sometimes when I'm traveling, I wantto check the status of the backup or something else (I know: Geek), and being able to access the server and all our PC's securely over the Internet through it's webpage (and Remote Desktop) is a tremendous asset if something goes haywire when I traveling.
Media sharing is simply enabled by vitue of WHS supporting Windows Media Connect. Once you've enable the service, you can access the content (music, pictures, and video) from any device (or PC) that supports Windows Media Connect. This includes Roku's and D-Link's neat devices as well as Hewlett-Packard's new LCD TV's.
Today, the server is primarily for backup and document share, as well as our movie server. When I'm done with my install it will become the central hub for media, including all our pictures, videos, music, and recorded TV from our MediaCenter. I am considering adding either Windows Extenders, Roku's SoundBridge devices or PC's in other rooms in the house.
As my plans solidifies I'll keep you posted.
