Apparently Power Pack 2 for Windows Home Server will get released sometime this year according to the folks at wegotserved. The Microsoft Home Server team has codenamed the release "Snoqualmie". In addition, WHS v2 is expected to be released sometime in 2010 according to techradar.com. For those of you who are unfamilar with WHS, shame on you! It is a great way to keep all of your machines backed up and also gives the ability to remotely access your files and computers when you are away from home. Please read my article about WHS if you are interested in learning more.

For Christmas this year I bought my wife an HP Mediasmart Server (OK... I bought it for myself and she gave me approval) . The Mediasmart server runs the Windows Home Server (WHS) OS. WHS is built on the Windows Server 2003 OS but it also borrows a few features from the Small Business Server OS as well. So what makes WHS so special? Well in my opinion it would be the built in disaster recovery features. The server has the capability to automatically make image backups of up to 10 workstations on your home network and it duels as a fileserver. WHS uses the Drive Extender technology which allows you to store multiple copies of your data. To better explain the technology I stole this summary from Wikipedia. Windows Home Server Drive Extender is a file-based replication system that provides three key capabilities: Multi-disk redundancy so that if any given disk fails, data is not lost Arbitrary storage expansion by supporting any type of hard disk drive (Serial ATA, USB, FireWire et... [More]