Microsoft Abandons Drive Extender Technology for Vail

[kevine]

Well, I have to tell you this is really disturbing. I do not know if I am going to wait to see what they come up with for a home user or just convert to Win7. What do you think?

Link here

[wolfie99]

boneheaded move by Microsoft. Will have to look at other options now.....

[Beefcake550]

Two words:

EPIC FAIL

Guess I at least I now have no need to upgrade to Vail. What a stinking piece of garbage. Every single feature that was the reason I got WHS v1 is now gone from Vail.

[wayner]

The excuse they give is pretty lame - they say there is no need for it now that multi-terabyte hard drives are commonplace. Try PVRing a lot of HDTV - even a 2 TB hard drive fills up pretty quickly.

This is reason number two to not upgrade my WHS box - lack of firewire on 64 bit OSes is the other.

[Trepidati0n]

Yeah...i'm pretty miffed right now. As I posted somewhere else, I was planning on moving ot VAIL in 2011 with 8x3TB drives on a supermicro 2xSAS card and a SSD for the OS drive. Put Sage on something like that, and you have a great plantform with tons of space (even with only get ~40% of it). My wife could record until she was blue in the face. Not looking forward to how this all ends =/

[reggie14]

This, combined with the lack of 64-bit firewire drivers, is probably enough to stop considering WHS as a platform for Sage servers.

I'm pretty baffled by this move. The only thing I can think of is that Drobo, ReadyNAS and QNAP have the networked-attached storage market wrapped up, and the WHS sales are low. Maybe Microsoft has had problems getting drive extender and/or folder duplication to work correctly, and decided its not worth it to them to fix it.

It really seems like this will kill WHS. I don't see how Microsoft and their hardware partners will be able to compete with special-purpose devices from Data Robotics, Netgear and QNAP in the home user and small-business market.

[Trepidati0n]

Originally Posted by reggie14

This, combined with the lack of 64-bit firewire drivers, is probably enough to stop considering WHS as a platform for Sage servers.

I'm pretty baffled by this move. The only thing I can think of is that Drobo, ReadyNAS and QNAP have the networked-attached storage market wrapped up, and the WHS sales are low. Maybe Microsoft has had problems getting drive extender and/or folder duplication to work correctly, and decided its not worth it to them to fix it.

It really seems like this will kill WHS. I don't see how Microsoft and their hardware partners will be able to compete with special-purpose devices from Data Robotics, Netgear and QNAP in the home user and small-business market.

Problem is that drobo, while braindead...charges you a lot more than the MS solution by about a factor of 2 at least. I can build an 8 bay WHS system with hot swap cability for ~$800...drobo is $1600.

I'm probably going to have to move to a pure Windows7 machine and then add RAID6 via a RAID card + SAS expander. Be about the same total cost as drobo, but at least the bandwidth won't suck. Also allow me to add cable card if I get pushed down that route.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by Trepidati0n

Problem is that drobo, while braindead...charges you a lot more than the MS solution by about a factor of 2 at least. I can build an 8 bay WHS system with hot swap cability for ~$800...drobo is $1600.

I'm probably going to have to move to a pure Windows7 machine and then add RAID6 via a RAID card + SAS expander. Be about the same total cost as drobo, but at least the bandwidth won't suck. Also allow me to add cable card if I get pushed down that route.

If you don't need something that big, and I doubt most users and even small businesses would, then things change. A 5-bay Drobo FS is $700. Plextor has a 4-bay NAS for $400. Netgear, QNAP and Thecus have some nicer 2-4 bay systems for $200-$400.

I think below 6-bay systems or so, more specialized systems are going to be very price competitive, and sometimes cheaper. Even above that things don't get too bad. A 6-bay ReadyNAS Pro Pioneer is still around $1000. I've seen better deals on QNAP and Thecus units too (at least, on a per-drive-bay cost).

But I think the move to hardware and software RAID is going to change things a bit. The WHS server market is going to turn even more into the hardware NAS market, where manufacturers really want to sell you units pre-filled with hard drives. There will be more people using hard drives officially supporting RAID to avoid problems with hard drives prematurely falling out of an array due to taking too long to respond. It will be harder for users to add/upgrade/remove drives on their own.

Sure, it will probably always be cheaper for enthusiasts to build their own WHS boxes than to go with a moderate or high-end pre-built system, but enthusiasts have lots of options that are either cheaper (e.g., FreeNAS), have more interesting features (e.g., unRAID in my opinion), or perhaps more familiar (e.g., Windows or Linux with just a hardware RAID card). I don't see WHS sticking around too long if it becomes even more of an enthusiast product.

I realize Media Center is a niche product for enthusiasts, but I think Microsoft is still clinging to the idea that they can become the digital hub for home users at some point in the future. I doubt Microsoft thinks there much of a market left for home servers. I think we're moving somewhat quickly to cloud-like models where most data will be kept on company-owned and operated machines, not users' machines.

As for Sage users, it just seems like this really takes away one of the biggest, if not the biggest, reason to use WHS. And, as far as I know, they're still left with problems recovering from system drive failures. If people already have a spare copy of WinXP or Win7 laying around, it seems seems like it will be hard to justify the $100 on a WHS license. Is a hardware/software RAIDed WHS Sage server likely to be any easier to administer than a Win7 server with a RAID card? What if you don't care about data redundancy in the first place?

[farscapesg1]

Hmm, now I dont' know where I'm going to go. I had thought of moving my WHS from it's physical installation to a VM, but put that on hold recently because I figured Vail would be out before too long. Now I see no reason to move to Vail at all....

Now my question is what other options are out there over WHS? My box is currently running SageTV, forums for my wife's photo club and my gaming group, AirVideo to transcode/stream video to my iPhone, backing up my PCs, and of course data storage (about 4TB right now). Of course, I just got 5 2TB green drives (WD20EADS) from work that I was planning on using in the new setup

I'm open to other options, as long as they are as easy to set up and manage as WHS. Plugins like MySQL, PHP, and of course SageTV were the second biggest benefit of WHS (after the expandable DE capabilities). I spend all my time at work dealing with servers, and I'm currently working on MS certifications, so the last thing I need is to spend time learning Linux or spending time managing another server for my video/music needs at home...

As for the Drobo... I've used one during their Beta testing as well as using a DroboPro at work (where the WD20EADS drives came from) and their performance is.... lacking

[Fuzzy]

Y'know, All they'd have to do to make it interesting again, would be to enable RAID-5 Dynamic Discs in Vail. It's really the only feature I miss going from a hacked-up winxp, to my win7 server.

[PLUCKYHD]

What are other peoples thoughts to this? I am actually shocked they are doing this but at the same time happy because it will break me from using slow as crap whs and actually installing the next version of windows server os which includes great backup function. I only started using whs for it's backup capability and easy pooling. I knew I should have stuck with raid and windows server. I have always tolerated whs and it's slow read and write access to pooled drives no I shall suffer no more!!


What do others think?

* merged *

[davephan]

Moving away from WHS might be an advantage for you since WHS could never be recovered quickly, since it can't be imaged. You could move to another version of Windows that can be imaged and recovered quickly. Or, you could move to Linux which could also be recovered with an image. You can then avoid the possibility of a painful and slow manual rebuild if you have a future system problem.

The storage efficiency is very inefficient with WHS, the same as RAID 1. To gain back The file storage redundancy, you could use RAID 5 or 6. Another option is to setup a second computer running unRAID for the video library, which needs the most storage. Or maybe some other secondary file storage computer could be setup for the video library.

Since Microsoft is abandoning WHS, then their support and patching will end too. A Windows operating system without patching is pretty unusable if it is exposed to the Internet. For SageTV's program guide, you have to expose the SageTV computer to the Internet. Although, you might be able to firewall it down to the ports needed only for the program file updates.

I was tempted to build with WHS, but the poor system recover options kept me way from the operating system. Maybe the OS move will be better for you in the long run.

Dave

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by davephan

firewall it down to the ports needed only for the program file updates.

I was tempted to build with WHS, but the poor system recover options kept me way from the operating system. Maybe the OS move will be better for you in the long run.

Dave

Agree 100% I am moving to windows server with raid 5 what I should have done originally.

[davephan]

The disk imaging products for server editions, such as Symantec and Acronis are pretty expensive. You might try the free Clonezilla imaging software, which works on Linux and I think it works on Windows server editions.

Dave

[panteragstk]

I want Vail for the same reason I wanted WHS. That is the simple home server setup that server 2008 is overkill for. Also, sagetv and the tuner manufacturers will likely support Vail which will be 64bit so we can use more memory, and will handle multitasking better for the systems that need it (or so I can build it and not touch it for a few years). I just want a compatible/stable server os that supports sagetv and tv tuner software as well as HA software and everything else I'd like my server to be capable of. I actually was going to use unRAID over WHS anyway so I wasn't going to use Drive Extender anyway.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by davephan

The disk imaging products for server editions, such as Symantec and Acronis are pretty expensive. You might try the free Clonezilla imaging software, which works on Linux and I think it works on Windows server editions.

Dave

Server 2011 I believe includes a backup solution better even then WHS but much the same.

[SWKerr]

I dropped WHS awhile back in favor of Win7 because I found I was not using any of its features. I was not using duplication because it was a waste of drive space. Once I heard that Vail was going to make the drives in the pool unreadable in other machines it was an easy decision to change. I would rather have a real RAID setup than something new and more complicated from Microsoft.

Still this is shocking an a load of BS. I assume this will be a long delay on the release while they figure out where they are going with WHS.

[bsquarewi]

So is there any other simple solution which offers DE type expandability where you can just plug in non-matched disks as you go? Meaning not striped RAID. Something that can be added to and subtracted from as needed. UnRAID seems to be a possible solution, but would SageTV Linux even run on one of these systems?

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by bsquarewi

So is there any other simple solution which offers DE type expandability where you can just plug in non-matched disks as you go? Meaning not striped RAID. Something that can be added to and subtracted from as needed. UnRAID seems to be a possible solution, but would SageTV Linux even run on one of these systems?

Personally, I think it depeeds on what you are using the storage for. I see no need to combine disks into one large volume if the primary use will be sagetv recordings and media (as sage, as well as any other decent media aggregator) will present them together, no matter WHAT drive they are on.

[that_kid]

I always thought about swtching over to WHS but I have full servers already and WHS doesn't work with domains so that's always made me reconsider. Now i'm glad that I did.