ChannelWeb Predicts Windows Home Server Move to the Cloud in ’09

By on December 3, 2008 in Windows Home Server

Online news site ChannelWeb today published it’s end of year “Microsoft Predictions for 2009″ feature, which amongst other crystal ball gazing predicts that Windows Home Server will move to a Cloud based OS at some point next year.

Windows Home Server Moves To The Cloud

Microsoft has done a solid job in generating market demand for Windows Home Server, but the complexity of the software has served as a barrier to adoption, according to some solution providers. Compounding the issue is the fact that HP’s Media Smart Server, which runs Windows Home Server, is priced out of reach of many consumers.

That’s why some partners expect Microsoft to offer an cloud-based version of Windows Home Server at some point in the near future as a way of building awareness of what the product can do.

“The logical progression of services should end with the consumer,” said one solution provider, who asked not to be named. “Microsoft wants to establish ‘sockets’ — whether they’re PCs, mobile devices, or home server platforms. And if those sockets are in the cloud, that’s the best case scenario for Microsoft.”

I find it fascinating that there’s solution providers out there that believe that Windows Home Server is complex – it’s possibly Microsoft’s least complex UI available and does such a great job of hiding away complexity. Whether consumers perceive it to be complex or not is a different matter, and that’s a marketing issue rather than an engineering problem. I guess part of the solution provider’s job (in conjunction with Microsoft) is to remove that perceived complexity, so clearly they’re not doing a great job of communicating “big button simplicity” to their customers.

As for a move to the cloud, interestingly enough, Paul Thurrott was proposing such a move for Small Business Server on the Windows Weekly podcast a week or so ago. I could be wrong, but for me, it’s way too early for WHS to move to the cloud – the bandwidth simply isn’t there right now to provide a consistent experience, and I’m still unconvinced that consumers are ready to trust their data to a remote supplier on the cloud (as their only backup solution) – big brand organisation or not.  General consumers have way more photos and videos than the average business user, and the disk space required and bandwidth to shift that stuff around would be huge. Besides, the tech industry at large has yet to figure out an easy way for consumers to move data around their homes, never mind around the globe – let’s fix the basic stuff first, eh?

Will we see partial cloud support through Live Mesh integration with WHS at some point? I hope so, but this will be providing more of an additional backup solution than moving the whole OS to the cloud.

We’ve only just started the journey to bring servers to the home. It may well be that in 5 or 10 years time, consumers skip home server hardware to a cloud based solution, but for now, I think WHS is here to stay. How about you? Can you see WHS in the cloud in the future?


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About Terry Walsh

Terry Walsh is the founding editor and owner of We Got Served. Since February 2007, the site has provided detailed coverage and analysis of the emerging home server category, and has subsequently grown into a trusted outlet for digital home news and reviews.
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  • http://www.CSharpConsultant.net Colin

    I want a WHS largely for storing and streaming iTunes music and videos that are often several gigabytes big.

    I really doubt I can set iTunes to use “the cloud” as my default folder, and I’m not particularly enthused about the idea of storing and streaming TB’s worth of data over the internet vs. my home network.

    Offline storage has its place, and there are plenty of online options for photo sharing and the other services WHS offers, but if that’s what you wanted, there’s a better alternative than WHS.

    I think the ChannelWeb prediction misses the point.

  • JohnBick

    Like you, I don’t see this happening in the near future. The problem is bandwidth — more precisely the lack of it! Backups of “complete” home systems will just take too long to accomplish. a single copy of my backups for a “main” (Vista/32) machine and a very low-end (WinXP) laptop require well over 350GB and then I have another 200GB of “duplicated” shares in my HP MediaSmart Server (MSS). And then there are the files (music, books, videos, etc.) that I don’t back up at all since I have original copies.

    And we haven’t even begun to address the bandwidth requirements for streaming audio, video, photos, etc.

    Compounding this is a major push on the part of ISPs to restrict the volume of data we are allowed to move each month. Looking at one ISP’s proposed charges I compute that I could easily pay for my HP MSS in less than six months!

    There is a place for “cloud” backups today and it is to back up irreplaceable data such as key photos and financial records. There are some solutions for this around today, but none really seem to get a good balance of WHS compatibility, simplicity of use, price per gigabyte, etc. So there is opportunity for the cloud and MS is certainly well-positioned to take advantage of that as an EXTENSION to WHS. Over time, if the bandwidth equation changes, this may well expand.

    As for “trust”… I think that the vendor who first meets the requirements of the WHS user will have an opportunity to quickly demonstrate trust. But one slip and they will loose it all for a very long time. (Note that MS is only recently re-qaining trust after the perception years ago that they were downloading sensitive data from user’s computers.)

    NET: Cloud as an extension of WHS, not as a replacement in the forseeable future.

  • KyleB

    How long would it take to “cloud” 2 TB worth of priceless data? at the subscription rates in the US (approx. 10/1) it would take just over 6 months of uninterrupted maxed out upload to a remote server.

    Not to mention failures, weather, poor ISP service, and not being able to use your connection for 6 months?

    *Not going to happen.

  • soaklord

    As usual, pundits proclaim things that are years off as being just around the corner. I currently have almost 3TB of data and my best upload speed is 128K at my highest tier (1.5Mb upload) Even at 10 times that, it would take FAR too long to actually get my data into the cloud. In theory, I love the idea. It would be VERY interesting to be able to remote in to a cloud and run programs from a nettop. And in practice, it’s just way too soon.

  • Aaron

    100% agreed, the ISP’s are way more than a year away from this. Say the average home server household needs 200 gigs of storage for backups and shares. I have no info to substantiate this number but it feels about right, maybe even on the low side since WHS is such a niche product. Now, my cable service is 6 megabit down and 768k up and I would imagine it’s somewhere near the average for DSL and Cable in the US. Let’s be aggressive and round up to 1 megabit. So 1 megabit/s would require 8 seconds for every megabyte. That’s 8,000 seconds for every gigabyte. So 200 gigabytes is 1.6 million seconds, which is 444 hours or 18 days. Sorry, I don’t think anyone is will wait for their initial backups to max our their upload bandwidth for 18 days. Ridiculous. This is a 2012 idea at earliest.

  • http://www.pcchecker.co.uk Andy

    I think Windows Home Server is definitely still best suited to enthusiast level home users as there are too many warning pop ups etc that would scare normal home users.

    The idea of a cloud based Windows Home Server service would be great to get people interested but again I am not convinced cloud based solutions are the best solution for 100s of GBs of important personal data which means I am still making back ups of back ups across hard disks and computers in my house.

  • Stenton23

    I can foresee a gradual move, with duplication of backup images, or even remote access, similar to such third-party services as LogMeIn. But I agree that a substantial cloud-based WHS is years away, and I think that if MS did it too quickly, it would pull the plug on its own product (to say nothing of its OEM partners).