Windows Home Server

Not sure how many people here know of or use Windows Home Server, but if you do Microsoft recently announced they are pulling the Drive Extender technology from the next beta of "Vail". Just today HP, one of the first hardware manufacturers of Home Server hardware, announced they are no longer making or selling their Media Smart servers.

Just thought I'd share this info with those who use the product, if you didn't already know. WHS is an awesome platform, I've used it since beta and it has saved my butt quite a few times.

More info:

Microsoft Halts Development of Drive Extender Technology

HP Pulls Plug on Media Smart

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Comments

veritas_libertas

Yeah, I'm very saddened by this. I built a WHS for my folks and was planning to build a new one in the future. I have a feeling WHS is on it's way out.

tiersten

Steve Ballmer may be looking into the removal of DE

-Foxer-

I love my WHS!! One of the most under-rated MS products if you ask me. In fact, I just added 2TB to it tonight with drive extender. It really is too bad if they get rid of it.

SteveLord

I've had one for over a year now. It HAS saved my butt a few times. And by that, I mean it's recovered the wife's computer from issues.

However, sometimes backups are bugged and sit for hours upon hours without moving. And unfortunately, the market for this didn't take off at all....so Microsoft doesn't dedicate much for resources to it.

rwmidl

veritas_libertas wrote: »

Yeah, I'm very saddened by this. I built a WHS for my folks and was planning to build a new one in the future. I have a feeling WHS is on it's way out.

I've really been looking forward to the new release. In fact I've been holding off on a hardware upgrade for my current server (9 year old P4 box) until the final hardware specs for Vail were released. But I tend to agree, I would not be surprised to hear Microsoft pulls the plug on this product.

tiersten wrote: »

Steve Ballmer may be looking into the removal of DE

I read that too. I'm not really holding my breath on Balmer doing any good here. Microsoft, in my opinion, is looking more at the business market, not the home user.

SteveLord wrote: »

I've had one for over a year now. It HAS saved my butt a few times. And by that, I mean it's recovered the wife's computer from issues.

However, sometimes backups are bugged and sit for hours upon hours without moving. And unfortunately, the market for this didn't take off at all....so Microsoft doesn't dedicate much for resources to it.

This is one of the biggest problems Microsoft has in my opinion, marketing. It's really hard to figure out what Microsoft is wanting to do with their products. There was absolutely no marketing for Home Server, except in the tech circles. Microsoft could have easily have done tv spots on this - why the product is good and easy to use - similar to their "To the Cloud" campaign. Guess what, WHS is "in the cloud" - it has a web interface where you can access all of your folders via the web. Frankly, I don't want to trust my data to "the cloud" - does anyone remember what happened with the T-Mobile "Sidekick" and the phones data that was "in the cloud"?

I still hope WHS can be salvaged - I've been thinking hard about this and I don't know of another product that is as easy to use and provides the same functionality.

eMeS

rwmidl wrote: »

This is one of the biggest problems Microsoft has in my opinion, marketing. It's really hard to figure out what Microsoft is wanting to do with their products. There was absolutely no marketing for Home Server, except in the tech circles.

I'm betting that one of the biggest problems with WHS was associated with when it was released. It came out pretty much right at the beginning of the recession. That alone likely had a major impact on sales of WHS.

Highly technical people would have either already had their own solution for what WHS does, or, as many of us did here, were able to piece together their own systems running WHS. That would have left a small market to buy the off-the-shelf model that HP was selling, and even at its low price it would have been a true luxury item.

MS

RobertKaucher

-Foxer- wrote: »

I love my WHS!! One of the most under-rated MS products if you ask me. In fact, I just added 2TB to it tonight with drive extender. It really is too bad if they get rid of it.

If you ask me it is so under-rated because they did not include it in either TechNet nor MSDN subscriptions.

If your base can not properly test or develop for it who is going to even bother with it? So you build something great but never devote any advertising dollars or allow methods for its greatness to spread by word of mouth. Of course it is going to fail.

rwmidl

eMeS wrote: »

I'm betting that one of the biggest problems with WHS was associated with when it was released. It came out pretty much right at the beginning of the recession. That alone likely had a major impact on sales of WHS.

Highly technical people would have either already had their own solution for what WHS does, or, as many of us did here, were able to piece together their own systems running WHS. That would have left a small market to buy the off-the-shelf model that HP was selling, and even at its low price it would have been a true luxury item.

MS

I believe it was released when the recession hit. But looking strictly at the HP hardware, I think Circuit City was the only brick and morter store that was selling the hardware off the shelf. Everyplace else you had to order it online. The one I saw at CC from what I remember wasn't even hooked up, and the sales reps couldn't explain anything about it. Poor marketing by multiple parties...

RobertKaucher wrote: »

If you ask me it is so under-rated because they did not include it in either TechNet nor MSDN subscriptions.

I know it's there now. But I did some looking and found that even towards the end of 2007 it apparently was not available on TechNet. Yeah, that is/was a pretty big "fail".

eMeS

rwmidl wrote: »

I believe it was released when the recession hit. But looking strictly at the HP hardware, I think Circuit City was the only brick and morter store that was selling the hardware off the shelf. Everyplace else you had to order it online. The one I saw at CC from what I remember wasn't even hooked up, and the sales reps couldn't explain anything about it. Poor marketing by multiple parties...

I remember seeing it in the store at Staples and Office Depot, and I think a couple of other random places.

What you've described sounds about how CC was about everything....

MS

rwmidl

MS - one thing I didn't add was when the original Media Smart servers came out, they were very underpowered. Just look around on Google for threads on how to replace the processor/memory on them. It seems as if the last release of the Media Smarts, HP finally put some more "meat" on them.

I, like a lot of people, used older equipment and pieced something together. I liked the small form factor of the Media Smart series, as well as the external drive trays. But the lack of being able to connect directly to it (you had to remote on to it to do anything) probably scared quite a few people away - those who were non-tech savy.

rwmidl

CC started going downhill years ago when they got rid of all their commission sales reps. Those guys usually knew their products pretty well (or at least pretended like they did).

RobertKaucher

eMeS wrote: »

I'm betting that one of the biggest problems with WHS was associated with when it was released. It came out pretty much right at the beginning of the recession. That alone likely had a major impact on sales of WHS.

Highly technical people would have either already had their own solution for what WHS does, or, as many of us did here, were able to piece together their own systems running WHS. That would have left a small market to buy the off-the-shelf model that HP was selling, and even at its low price it would have been a true luxury item.

MS

I don't think this is really the case. At the time it came out I was working as an In-home Agent with the Geek Squad and had plenty of chances to sell this thing to high-end customers who would have loved it as a complete solution. The problem was none of them knew what it was and already had ideas of what they wanted in their minds using non-MS technologies. Telling a Dr. or highly technical engineer with a million dollar home that his beloved product X is inferior to WHS would just not go down well. If it was so great with iPods and stuff why had he never even seen one? Through most of 2007 I was doing stuff like that and got tired of dealing with WHS because it was like Big Foot - everyone thought it was a myth because it was hidden away and never marketed properly. It was all during the damn Vista debacle when Apple was screaming "EVERYONE KNOWS MS SUCKS!" and MS would just blush and hide its face and the public were all like the kid on the Simpsons "MS sucks! Ha ha!"

It's like this with Silverlight all over again. MS does something really cool and then rolls over and kills it because of their own stupidity. It's as if Bill Gates' Apple envy, that actually spawned Windows, never went away. Now they are hinting at killing SL because of HTML5. Give me a frigging break! They are just going to destroy any work I have done with SharePoint/Silverlight/WCF if Silverlight only continues in the Win Phone market. How do you encourage developers to move into integrating something as flagship as SharePoint with Silverlight and then back away like you are going to let SL die? Sorry for the rant... I'm just a little frustrated with MS right now. I hope to hear a "We aren't going to kill SL," talk at FireStarter today or I may actually cry.

RobertKaucher

eMeS wrote: »

I remember seeing it in the store at Staples and Office Depot, and I think a couple of other random places.

What you've described sounds about how CC was about everything....

MS

They were on the shelves in Staples/Best Buy/CC but HP/MS *NEVER* provided marketing or eLearnings for the system so that sales associates could actively talk about what it was and why it was so great.

I encouraged sales assocates to look at it - but when other things are pounded into their heads by the HP reps and managers the in-home guy means nothing. No one in my store ever even had the chance to log onto the OS and use it.

rwmidl

RobertKaucher wrote: »

They were on the shelves in Staples/Best Buy/CC but HP/MS *NEVER* provided marketing or eLearnings for the system so that sales associates could actively talk about what it was and why it was so great.

I encouraged sales assocates to look at it - but when other things are pounded into their heads by the HP reps and managers the in-home guy means nothing. No one in my store ever even had the chance to log onto the OS and use it.

I never saw it at the local BB here in Charleston, and if they did have one it might have been buried somewhere in the store.

rwmidl

RobertKaucher wrote: »

It's like this with Silverlight all over again. MS does something really cool and then rolls over and kills it because of their own stupidity. It's as if Bill Gates' Apple envy, that actually spawned Windows, never went away. Now they are hinting at killing SL because of HTML5. Give me a frigging break! They are just going to destroy any work I have done with SharePoint/Silverlight/WCF if Silverlight only continues in the Win Phone market. How do you encourage developers to move into integrating something as flagship as SharePoint with Silverlight and then back away like you are going to let SL die? Sorry for the rant... I'm just a little frustrated with MS right now. I hope to hear a "We aren't going to kill SL," talk at FireStarter today or I may actually cry.

I wonder if Microsoft got such a beating over the whole "Vista debacle" they are kind of gun shy now?

RobertKaucher

rwmidl wrote: »

I wonder if Microsoft got such a beating over the whole "Vista debacle" they are kind of gun shy now?

They were like that already. It's what allowed the Vista debacle to occur. Cave to pressure from HW vendors (HP, Sony, Toshiba, etc) to allow them to sell "Designed for Windows Vista" PCs that use much less RAM than MS knew would allow the system to function properly and then the vendors choked the dang systems with so much bloatware there was no hope of decent performance. Add that on top of the HW vendors slowness to develop drivers that confirmed to MS best practices that were put in place since Windows 2000 ("Don't use Kernel mode drivers any more, we aren't going to allow them in future releases of Windows!") and the general heaviness of Vista and toss an AV like Norton on the heap and BOOOM! It explodes. I recall when I was using the Vista beta and RC I thought for sure it was going to get pushed out another 6 months before the RTM... But it came anyway and we all know how it was received.

exampasser

A little bit off-topic, I really like the looks of the small form factors that OEMs such as HP have offered, but one reason why I haven't bought one is that I haven't seen one with any sort of video output connections, so if I had any network issues I could not locally connect to the machine.

rwmidl

exampasser wrote: »

A little bit off-topic, I really like the looks of the small form factors that OEMs such as HP have offered, but one reason why I haven't bought one is that I haven't seen one with any sort of video output connections, so if I had any network issues I could not locally connect to the machine.

If you search around, there were some people who were able to mod their MSS and put a vga out on them I believe.

SteveLord

One thing I still dont like is the inability to really customize backups. You're limited to entire partitions, instead of being able to pick folders.

I have an xbox360 that streams movies from my WHS. Probably the second best thing about it....and the only real thing I use the xbox for.

rwmidl

Steve - what I did to help with that was I don't keep anything on my laptop other than the OS and .pst files. Documents, music, etc I host on the server. After my wifes laptop crashed, I got her to do the same (she no longer takes her laptop to work), and I have her syncing a USB thumb drive with the documents she needs using SyncToy.

tpatt100

I have a HP Media Smart, the first one they released. Ran great, I liked the small form factor and how I could tuck it away. I was using it for backups and streaming media to my PS3 downstairs in the living room. Then it just went belly up on me. Drive failure I thought but then I could no longer connect to it. It would boot up and it was on the network but I could no longer access it.

I tried to do a restore with no luck. I then tried RDP to it and it came up asking for an account and password and that did not work. I tried researching a possible solution and I could not even do a factory reset on the device.

rwmidl

tpatt100 wrote: »

I have a HP Media Smart, the first one they released. Ran great, I liked the small form factor and how I could tuck it away. I was using it for backups and streaming media to my PS3 downstairs in the living room. Then it just went belly up on me. Drive failure I thought but then I could no longer connect to it. It would boot up and it was on the network but I could no longer access it.

I tried to do a restore with no luck. I then tried RDP to it and it came up asking for an account and password and that did not work. I tried researching a possible solution and I could not even do a factory reset on the device.

Sounds like some odd catastrophic failure, or it got pwned...

Zentraedi

Meh. Drive extender doesn't scale well. Just go for a FlexRAID or unRAID solution. Perhaps MS should just hire the FlexRAID guy and build that into Vail.

tpatt100

I am ordering a small form factor desktop used from the Dell outlet and just setting up backups of some important folders I want backed up probably using the Windows backup program. Really just want it to run tversity mainly.