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 etc.) in any mixture and capacity - similar in concept to JBOD
• A single folder namespace (no drive letters)

Users (specifically those who configure a family's home server) deal with storage at two levels: Shared Folders and Disks. The only concepts relevant regarding disks is whether they have been "added" to the home server's storage pool or not and whether the disk appears healthy to the system or not. This is in contrast with Windows' Logical Disk Manager which requires a greater degree of technical understanding in order to correctly configure a RAID array. Shared Folders have a name, a description, permissions, and a flag indicating whether duplication (redundancy) is on or off for that folder.

If duplication is on for a Shared Folder (which is the default on multi-disk Home Server systems and not applicable to single disk systems) then the files in that Shared Folder are duplicated and the effective storage capacity is halved. However, in situations where a user may not want data duplicated (e.g. TV shows that have been archived to a Windows Home Server from a system running Windows Media Center), Drive Extender provides the capability to not duplicate such files if the server is short on capacity or manually mark a complete content store as not for duplication.

Although WHS can be installed any old piece of hardware there are definately benefits of buying the MediaSmart Server available from HP. For example, the MediaSmart server case was built with WHS in mind. It features four hot-swappable drive cages and it also has LED lights which will change color depending on the status of the server. Not to mention that the Mediasmart server from HP is very small in size which means you can easily throw it under the desk or on a bookshelf. The only real drawback to the HP model is the headless design. This means there is no VGA hookup for a monitor. However, I recently discovered a post on one of the WHS forums where you can buy a custom built cable for the HP Mediasmart server. I picked one up and it works perfectly.

Most of the administration for WHS is done through the connector software. This is basically a winforms app which uses RDP for communication. For the average home user, the connector software is all that you will ever need. However, if you are a power user you can always configure your server via remote desktop. In addition, the connector software is extensible due to the fact that you can install add-ins. There are already a large collection of add-ins posted on the wegotserved website.

Did I mention that if you are a .NET developer, there is a Visual Studio template available so you build your own add-ins! The template is posted on Brendan Grant's blog. I loaded the template up on my home machine last night and started cranking out some code. I got a "Hello World" add-in written and deployed within a matter of minutes.