The Windows Home Server cat is finally out with the bag. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates officially announced the existence with the Windows Household Server at his January 7 Customer Electronics Show (CES) kick-off keynote. Throughout his remarks, Gates offered nearly no details about the forthcoming methods,
Office 2007 Professional Plus, apart from to note that the very first model will be from Hewlett Packard and be recognized since the HP MediaSmart Server and will ship in the 2nd 50 percent of 2007. So far, there doesn't seem to be a publicly available datasheet from Microsoft or HP on the software or hardware behind the new methods. Gates outlined in a pretty general way some of the features that will probably be part of the expected Home Server systems. They will provide automated backup; secure connectivity among multiple PCs, Zunes, Xboxes and other devices; and terabytes of pluggable storage. Some models might be Intel-based; others will run on AMD processors. Fortunately, Within Microsoft blogger Nathan Weinberg offered lots of other details that he said were "100 percent confirmed." (By Microsoft? by HP? By some other entity/entities? Not clear.) Regardless with the source(s), Weinberg's information sure looks authentic. Here's what Weinberg is reporting about Windows House Server: * Home Server streams on the Xbox 360 and other Media Center Extenders * It backs up to internal and external hard drives the entire contents of every PC daily — and not once, but twice, letting you restore files or entire PCs immediately. It also stores multiple versions of files * Home Server will probably be sold in two forms,
Office Home And Business, just like Windows XP Media Center used to get: As a full hardware/software package by manufacturers, and as a software package to system builders * Beta 2 of House Server will arrive in just two weeks, on January 22. Pre-Beta 1 was reached last July. They are also projecting Release Candidate status by May 15 and the final Release To Manufacturing on June 22 Weinberg has tons of additional details. So go read his full post. Additional information: Charlie Kindel,
Microsoft Office 2007 Key, a member with the Windows House Server team,
Windows 7 Home Premium Key, blogged that his team had been working on the Windows Home Server product for three years. Kindel posted an interesting photo of a extremely compact Windows Property Server prototype, as well.Even more info: MSTechToday's Brandon LeBlanc finds the data sheet for Household Server. My biggest question: How does Windows Residence Server compete (or cooperate with) Windows LiveDrive, Microsoft's forthcoming virtual-storage service,
Office Enterprise 2007 Sale, not to mention the already shipping Windows Live OneCare, Microsoft's all-in-one anti-malware/backup and restore service?LeBlanc may have discovered at least part with the answer to how Property Server meshes with Windows Live.