Business Case Study: Windows Home Server

Way back in October last year I wrote a few posts extolling the virtues of using Windows Home Server as a small business solution, and now I present this case study about: My own business.

Personally I am always more than a little bit wary of companies with blogs (just like mine) who write posts about products or services which blur the line between advertising and information.  Is the product or service really that good, or has the lure of a free bit of software or hardware led to a momentary drop in moral standards?
The best way for anyone to combat this question is to put their money where their mouth is, and this is precisely what I did towards the end of January when I purchased a HP MediaSmart EX490.

Like many small businesses I run Windows Small Business Server 2008 (primarily for Exchange e-mail for my various domains) but was looking for a central repository for files to be shared around various computers in the house, and an invisible backup solution for all of my Windows and Mac machines.
As I already had additional hard drives to install in the HP server, I didn’t push the boat out and go for the higher specified model so ended up with the default model which comes with a 1Tb hard drive as standard.  Naturally the first caution I would throw out here is a single drive in an appliance like this is a major no go.  If the drive collapses, so does all your data (which of course, you have backed up).  I initially added two additional terabyte drives during setup and have maxxed out the storage slots this past week with a fourth and final drive.

As the EX490 is primarily designed to be a consumer unit the setup process is extremely straightforward.  Just attach the server to your local network, allow it to assign itself an address from your DHCP server and run some simple configuration software.
My only minor gripe with this setup process (and again this is a consumer unit) is that you aren’t given the option to configure a manual IP address during setup.  For regular users who are just going to access their server via its name this isn’t going to cause any sleepless nights.  But for me it was a slight omission, but one that was quickly resolved by connecting via the Remote Desktop client.

After installation I made sure to run Windows Update so that Power Pack 3 for WHS was installed, and adding in Windows 7 client functionality (the HP image on the machine contained PP2), then added each of my machines into the console.

After migrating all of my data from my creaking and very unhappy NAS server my first port of call was to switch on folder duplication.  This allows your data to be spread across multiple hard drives, so if one of them goes South your data isn’t taken with it.  In the event of this happening the server throws up warnings on the WHS Console and gives you the option to remove the bad drive and replace it with a new one resulting in no loss of data.  How do I know this?  I had a Seagate hard drive give up the ghost on my old custom built WHS box a couple of years ago.  As many a techie will tell you, you only ever lose valuable data once.  Sadly many of us have learnt the hard way, but at least we can pass on our experiences so hopefully it won’t happen to you as well!  As you can see from the screenshot below, enabling Folder Duplication is as simple as ticking a box.

This particular home server is very heavy on media conversion and sharing capabilities, which aren’t primarily my focus for this unit and you can read more about those in my previous write up.  But I will happily admit I love having all my music shared on the server, and having each of the various shares as part of my Windows 7 libraries.

For me one of the other key elements for chosing this particular home server is its ability to do complete image backups of all the PCs each day, and my Mac’s.  I have two Apple machines, a previous generation iMac and a MacBook Pro.  Up until now I have been using external USB drives for Time Machine backups.  The HP software allows separate Time Machine partitions for each machine to be part of one central Mac share on the home server.  This is absolutely priceless for me, and as many homes and small businesses now contain Apple hardware of some form so things really does make the MediaSmart a focal point for storing everything.

But what about backing up the server itself?  It’s great having everything in one place, but that’s a single point of failure right?  Absolutely.  I have a Terabyte external eSATA/USB drive attached to my MediaSmart server which is added into the storage pool as a specific backup device for Windows Home Server.  Then when you want to backup your home server data, it’s as simple as selecting which shares need to be backed up and clicking a button (as shown below).

As an extra added protection layer I also use CloudBerry Backup for WHS which I have reviewed previously.  This backup is scheduled to run daily and copies my important documents over to Amazon S3 storage.
Just because I’m paranoid about losing data I also backup with Carbonite as well, although this is done from a desktop PC as I found it was unhappy working with Windows Home Server.

So can Windows Home Server really be a solution for a small business?  I think so.  If your company contains a handful of users and you aren’t in need of Small Business Server then this is a great first step into managed computing.