WHS is, I believe an inspired idea. Totally beyond any other product yet released by Microsoft. I believe that this is one of the very few releases that targets a nearly untouched market. And that’s why believe that Microsoft will do very, very well out of this.

So, in thinking of WHS I did the obvious and did a Google Blog Search. I found some facinating reviews here and here.

Paul Thurrott says:

While individual WHS features like full household backup are exciting, the overall direction this product is taking is, perhaps, even more interesting. I hope you’re getting the notion that simplicity is Job One with the WHS team. Well, this mantra extends to every possible facet of the system. For example, WHS servers are headless, and you couldn’t connect a keyboard, mouse, or display to one if you wanted to. Instead, there are only two ports on a WHS server–for the power cord and Ethernet–and a single power switch. (That’s right, it’s wired only. You are expected to connect the WHS box to your home network’s router, and PC clients can be wired or wireless.)

A simple install CD, places in a networked PC, gets WHS up and running. There are few questions to answer during setup, involving passwords, recovery questions, and the standard questions about Windows Updates. From there, you can access the WHS console, where you setup the home server, the users who can access it, and the shared folders you’d like to create. There are no domains–though that was experimented with back in the Quattro days, Microsoft quickly dropped that notion in a nod towards simplicity. Besides, how many users will you need in a typical household?

That’s it: simplicity. How much more complicated can you get? You could try Norton Ghost which, compared to WHS, is as userfreindly as a chainsaw ( and that’s without even using WHS). In any case using Ghost gave me multiple 10-15 Gig files ( 50% compression rate, roughly) for each PC. I have neither the space to store all of that or the time to manually delete old backups ( I’ve tried more than once to get Ghost to do this, without success). WHS meanwhile:

In WHS, Microsoft moves the unit of backup from the PC to the household. WHS provides a single solution for backing everything up in your home, every night, without having to push buttons. This includes a new form of image-based PC backup–similar to Complete PC Backup in Vista, but based on new patent-pending Microsoft Research technologies–as well as drag and drop access to individually backed files, from different points in time. On the server, Microsoft is using its Single Instance Store (SIS) technologies from Windows Server 2003 to keep the backup size as small as possible, and it’s doing so across PCs. (How good is this technology? Headrick said that they’re seeing 15-19 TB of data stored in 300 GB or less of backup space.) So if you have an identical version of foo.dll on five different PCs, only one version of that file will be backed up on the server, dramatically lowering the storage requirements. (This works with PCs based on Windows XP and Vista.) Smart.

15TB into 300GB???????? Yeeeshhhh 🙂 . More space for my hardware buck, eh? Sounds like a winner. The best thing is that Ihave do do absolutely Zero. More than that,t he connector handles all the addressing ( Iwont have to worry about IP address changes every time  my PC’s log on to the network in a different order and get different address from DHCP).

Simplicity is key here.

In retrospect,  this is part of the same reason that Microsoft released so many different versions of Vista. Why over complicate people with features/capabilities they arn’t going to use?

All things considered, its worth it to buy a new Dell Poweredge 2.8Ghz 160GB (  will go up to 240Gb). I’ll be ordering tomorrow ( no use ordering before I’m ready- they’ll only deliver next week wether I order today or tomorrow).

Until it arrives…..