Yesterday at CES Bill Gates announced the launch Windows Home Server designed as a headless server to server content across your home network, stream media to Media Centre Extenders, including my favourite the XBox 360 and provide automated backups. Cool!
Based on the buzz going around it seems that you will be able to connect terabytes of data as a single virtual drive, even connect to your server from elsewhere on the internet, checks the security status of the different computers on your home network (I assume it will alert you if something is wrong and I hope it downloads patches once and distributes them across the network saving on bandwidth.
The server will run on Intel and AMD with HP being the first supplier confirmed to be shipping a product in the second half of 2007.
For some more good information check out All about Microsoft, Charlie Kindel from the Windows Home Server team, and Inside Microsoft.
For someone in the process of digitising all of our content and with the XBox 360 quickly replacing the need for much else in the living room I am interested. I wonder where is the catch? I guess I will need to wait until either a beta version or the general release later this year. Although I suspect the catch will be that I will need one PC with Vista Ultimate according to Nathan Weinberg from Inside Microsoft.
Michael Specht 