HP Windows Home Servers in September

Been biting your nails down to the bone in anticipation of the first Windows Home Server boxes? Worry not, my anxious friend: it looks like HP is set to be the first out of the gate with their monolithic MediaSmart Home Servers. HP will sell two models at launch: a $599 model with 500GB of media storage and a 1TB model at $749. Both servers will rock the 1.8Ghz AMD Sempron processor and will ship with HP's own Photo Webshare software suite, which allows for the automated building of a website for your stored photos. Both servers will ship on September 15, according to Amazon.com.

Now that all the formalities are out of the way, let's get down to brass tacks: does anyone actually need one of these things? Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research sure seems to think so. He's been testing out a Windows Home Server for a while now and seems quite impressed. "A terabyte of networked storage that I can access from any PC (or Mac) in my home. It's great. It's simple and it works," he writes. "If that's all it did, I would be happy but there's much more." Gartenberg goes on to list the automatic backup of PCs on the network, remote access from anywhere and streaming media as a few of the platform's greatest conveniences.  

For more on Windows Home Server:
- see this Computerworld article on the HP servers
- and this Jupiter Research blog entry