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Now I realise this is probably going to come across as flamebait, but I don’t care – I feel quite strongly about this so I thought I would voice my opinion.

For those that don’t know, Microsoft has announced a new product in the form of Windows Home Server, the ArsTechnica article covers all the major features most of which are pretty standard (file and print sharing, remote access, etc) but it does include some interesting new features in the shape of:

• Automatic Image / Snapshot Based backup of attached Windows clients.
• Bare metal recovery of said snapshots and machines.
• Incremental (changed bits only, ala Apple’s TimeMachine) backup of all clients, ignoring duplicate files.

I know some of you are probably reading this thinking “I can do all of that with Linux / a NAS solution” – well I personally don’t think you can. The WHS way of tackling the problem of ‘Digital Media Storage’ is a clever one and the features I mentioned above are truly innovative, in the fact that we have not seen them in any other systems yet.

Now before I sing its praises too much, and sound like some kind of micro$oft fanboi (the worst kind!) there are quite a few things that they have gotten wrong, the biggest of which is the pricetag (Bill Gates mentioned the unit would be “sub $1,000″… presumably with a pitiful storage pool). However, at least Microsoft are actually creating interesting new products again, something which many of us feel hasn’t happened for nearly a decade.