Shouzer

I suppose with my recent update about the iPhone, I should also spread the love for my future employer. As most people know, I’ve become a recent Apple fan, but that hasn’t stopped me from loving up some of the recent Microsoft products. I’ve been a huge fan of their gaming platform ever since the Xbox was released. After modding that sucker, there was simply nothing that could beat it. For the record, it wasn’t at all about the piracy capabilities–Xbox Media Center blew everything else away (I still use it to stream media from my PC to my TV), and I owned something like 29 games. I also already own 11 games for the 360 (which is, in itself, a great product).

I recently reformatted my sister’s computer with Windows Vista, which she acquired freely and legally from her school, as she’s also a CS major. So far, I love it, and I think it’s a huge step above XP. Now, I do realize there are a bunch of silly DRM restrictions, but I haven’t run into them yet, so I can’t speak about them. As a user experience, though, I’ve really enjoyed it.

So, on to the new product. During his keynote at CES, Bill Gates announced Windows Home Server (I’ll refer to it as WHS from hereon out). As far as I’m concerned (at least from what I’ve read and seen), this is a must-have product. It’s the setup I intended to give myself once I started making some real world money and had a house/apartment of my own, albeit in a roundabout fashion.

From what I understand, Microsoft intends this OS to run on a computer that you’ll literally store in your closet. It’ll be headless, which means there’s no keyboard, monitor, or mouse attached. All you’ll give it is power and ethernet. So what’s it actually do? Well, first and foremost, this is where you’ll store your media. Anybody with a 360 (admittedly not a huge crowd) should know the strength of being able to stream your entire music collection to your system while you’re playing any and every game. Imagine having all your media in one place and easily being able to stream it to all your PCs. (Sure, you can do it now, but the point is that WHS makes this easy for you and has other benefits I’ll get to).

On top of this, it keeps your data safe with RAID-like system. Microsoft says this system allows for easier addition and removal of drives, with built-in redundancy. One of the smartest ideas, to me, is that it does away with drive letters (at least as far as the user is concerned). You throw in another drive, and you didn’t add a D: drive, you’ve just given the system more space. There is no user-level concept of drive levels. I say “user-level concept”, because my understanding is that the drive letters are still there for the OS, but you’ll never know it. Want to upgrade a drive? Great, it’s basically hot-swappable, because of the way the redundancy works. Replace a 60gb drive with a 200gb drive and you’ve simply got 140gb more than before. Your redundancy will be rebuilt automatically. Brilliant, especially for a consumer product.

Another benefit is that this data will be accessible remotely. You’ll log into your server thrown a Windows Live-allocated IP (or something like that), and you’ll have instant access to everything on the WHS system. Perfect if you’re visiting family and want to share a photo from your latest vacation (and you don’t have it already loaded on your iPhone, hehe). In addition, you can then open a remote desktop to any of the PCs on your network. They’re not directly exposed to the internet that way, as WHS acts as a proxy.

Another great feature is that WHS backs up all your networked PCs once a day. This isn’t some wimpy backup of your Documents folder, but a complete system backup. How can it handle all the data? Simply, it uses intelligent backups. If you’re backing up two system, it doesn’t store two copies of identical files, just one. Great idea there. The backups also store every copy of a file you’ve had, but does it through a revision-based system (think CVS or SVN). Basically, if you’re writing a paper, you’ll be able to grab the copy of the paper from two weeks ago if you want. Why? Because instead of overwriting the original backup with the current edition, it’ll store only the changes you’ve made in (what I assume is) a DB-like format. So if you only changed a word, it only keeps track of that word. It saves space, but it’s also a much more powerful backup.

What this backup also means is that you’ve got a complete working copy of every system on your network in case something goes wrong. Your hard drive crashed? No big deal, throw a new on in there, and restore your system from the WHS backups. No need to reformat and reinstall all your programs. It just works. Nice.

The media and data sharing is available to any system on the network, be it Windows, OS X, or Linux-based. Obviously it can’t backup an entire OS X system the same way it can a Windows system, but I read that Microsoft claims it makes a great location for Apple’s upcoming Time Machine. So, in theory, it should give you the same power on a Mac, though probably not as easily. Still, the ability is there.

I’m sure there’s features I’m leaving out, but that’s all I can remember right now. All told, this early January has left me wanting quite a few new products. Who knows what they’ll be like when they’re released, but there’s a lot of potential out there.