Thursday, December 06, 2007
Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House?
Microsoft recently commissioned a children’s book titled “Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House?” to help parents explain to their children everything about their new stay-at-home Windows Home Server, a.k.a HP EX475 MediaSmart Home Server. You have to admit it’s a really great marketing campaign! People usually describe servers as a stack of some ugly hardware in a storage room of every company and NOT something lying around at home. So, Microsoft brought up this new technique of bring it home in a very “home-friendly” manner. They even put together a series of short videos of a “techie” going into a house and interviewing everyone in the household about the “new member” of the family - the server. There are two videos out, and they are very funny! You can watch them here.
The whole idea is: it’s not less of a server now that it’s a stay-at-home server, by getting Windows’ stay-at-home server you will improve your home network security and capabilities. Some of the highlight features are that you can connect your Xbox to it and access videos and audio files stored in the server and play them on your TV (just like the Apple TV). With a few clicks, you can also set it to automatically backup files on the computers connected to it on the local network (wired or wirelessly). This release allows you to connect up to 10 users and 1 guest account.
Microsoft really knows how to reach out to non-tech savvy people, bringing them the latest technology in a simple way. I know I am going to get something with that last statement, but hey, Microsoft is in every house and that should say something. Here’s a preview of the book:
The book will be published and sold on Amazon in the near future.
Currently, the server is available in 500GB HD but I was expecting a lot more than that! It costs around $700. A 1TB is not yet in-stock but should be very soon - now that will probably be enough for some families. Of course expanding the capacity of the HD is possible and it can be reach up to 9TB - which is a relief. The storage appears as one large volume, so whenever you add a drive it will expand the same drive, no partitioning allowed. One downside, you can NOT load a program on the HP MediaSmart Server and share it among multiple PCs, which is a bummer. Maybe there will be a work-around hack for this…
You can check out the flash interactive video available here to see how the server can be used in your entire house, room by room.
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