A New Kind of Home Computer: Windows Home Server Preview
by Ryan Smith on September 4, 2007 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
WHS As A Backup Suite
Although Microsoft is offering many features with WHS, it's WHS as a backup suite that is the single biggest feature of the OS. For Microsoft, this is more or less breaking new ground on an industry that is underdeveloped. At the corporate level there are numerous competting backup suites, but at the consumer level that WHS is targeting there's a handful of packages and Windows' own built-in backup system.
What does exist in the consumer space right now either does backups to the local disk, or if it's designed to do remote backups it does so via making whole copies of a disk, neither of which come close to what corporate software can do. WHS's backup abilities as a result are Microsoft's attempts to bring corporate features down to a home user, in line with the entire theme of WHS being a home's first server.
Central to the backup feature of WHS is the WHS Connector package, which serves as both the backup client for the machine and the key piece of software that integrates a machine into a WHS server. Once a new client is connected, the console can be used to configure the backup settings for that individual machine; out of the box all clients are set to backup between 12am and 6am, and most users will only need to enable backups for the new client. The client also has some control over the backup process without using the administrative console, and can initiate a backup at any time. Finally, the connector software allows WHS to keep track of the general health of each client and report on problems such as missing updates.
On the server side, anyone familiar with corporate backup software will undoubtedly find themselves at home with WHS. Along with scheduling backup times and triggering backups, administrators can exclude folders (but not files or file types) on a per-machine basis, view a list of backups, and manually purge old backups. To that extent WHS will also purge old backups automatically based on retention settings. All of this past the first backup is done incrementally to minimize space used and data transferred.
Furthermore, as the developer of Windows, Microsoft gets a strong ace up their sleeve in backup management: the volume shadow copy ability. We've previously talked about this in our Vista review as Microsoft is using it to run Vista's Previous Version feature, and on a server this ability is much more potent. Because WHS can back up the entire contents of a system (including the OS) it will back up a lot of redundant files; with a 10 client limit that's potentially 10 copies of Windows that need to be stored. Volume shadow copy can recognize the redundant clusters making up all those files and only store a single copy, so in a completely homogenous environment WHS will only need to store a single copy of Windows for the entire house.
The benefits of this further extend to user data, as any other duplicate files (e.g. music) will also only be stored a single time. The incremental backups that WHS does further benefit from the cluster level identification as WHS will only need to store the cluster changes of a file whenever a file is changed. Finally all of this is compressed to squeeze out whatever last bit of space savings can be found. All of these abilities due to volume shadow copy results in WHS backups being exceptionally efficient and making it possible to back up several machines with a drive much smaller than their combined drive space.
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leexgx - Wednesday, September 5, 2007 - link
i think you mean {with out duplication) as if you got 2x 200gb with it turnd on you only get 200gb any way
i agree if raid fails it can be an problem some times getting the data off it
With WHS just plug the disk into an other pc and goto disk manager and Give the disk an Letter or mount it as an drive folder and you see all the data on it
tynopik - Wednesday, September 5, 2007 - link
> i think you mean {with out duplication) as if you got 2x 200gb with it turnd on you only get 200gb any wayno, if you were duplicating EVERYTHING (which most people won't want to do) you will have 400gb*. 1st copy on the 400gb and half 2nd copy on one 200gb and other half 2nd copy on other 200gb
leexgx - Wednesday, September 5, 2007 - link
darn miss read both posts i just read it like 200gb and 200gb a 400gb so assume last one was the 2 200gb put together to make 400gb----other post
i got you now on the 3 one if all 3 happend you lose data
tynopik - Wednesday, September 5, 2007 - link
the other thing i forgot to mention is selective duplicationwhat if you have 500gb of files but only have 5gb that need duplication?
WHS is much, much more efficient in such a scenario. Only duplicating what needs to be duplicated and merging the remaining space
i can't wait for MS to include this feature in regular windows, it's freaking fantastic
ATWindsor - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
What if I want to have added protection on all my stuff? With raid 5 I loose 25% of the space, with WHS-duplication I loose 50% (and the performance is worse). Even people who wants an easy setup has diffrent needs.tynopik - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
> What if I want to have added protection on all my stuff? With raid 5 I loose 25% of the space, with WHS-duplication I loose 50% (and the performance is worse).that is only true if
1. you have 4 drives
2. they are all equal size
consider a scenario that i mentioned elsewhere where you have (2) 200GB drives and a 400GB drive
with raid5 you would only be able to use 200GB of the 400GB drive wasting half it's space right off the bat. So you are left with essentially 3 200GB drives. Then parity data takes up another drive leaving you with 400gb of space. Which is the exact same amount that WHS gives you.
but i will tell you this, RAID sucks, especially RAID5
you mess up one thing and you lose the entire volume
even with raid 1 i had more problems than it was worth
raid is just going to cause more difficulties and support calls, the exact opposite of what you want for a 'black-box' like this
and i'm not the only one who feels this way
http://www.pugetsystems.com/articles?&id=29">http://www.pugetsystems.com/articles?&id=29
[quote]
However, at the agreement of our support staff, I estimate that anywhere from 25% to 30% of our customers with RAID will call us at some point in the first year to report a degraded RAID array or problem directly resulting from their RAID configuration.[/quote]
that sort of problem rate is simply unacceptable
and what if suddenly you decide that there is a bunch of stuff you DON'T need to duplicate? there is no graceful way to handle that with raid
WHS if simple, flexible, powerful and reliable (in the sense it's not likely to cause problems like raid systems do)
ATWindsor - Saturday, September 8, 2007 - link
There is many ways to mess up a whole lot of dta, raid or non-raid, I'm pretty sure i can make the datapool disappear pretty easy in whs also. (it can be recovered of course, but so can i raid5-volume).If people use problem-prone onboard raid-options on mobos, I'm sure quite a few run in to trouble, that doesn't make raid5 a bad idea for everyone. Same with your example with diffrent-sized disks, i happen to have 4 diks of the same size. Thats the problem with lack of options, people with needs diffrent than the exactly the ones that happen to be included gets a worse product.
AtW
ATWindsor - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
What if I want to have added protection on all my stuff? With raid 5 I loose 25% of the space, with WHS-duplication I loose 50% (and the performance is worse). Even people who wants an easy setup has diffrent needs.Gholam - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
Performance of consumer-grade RAID5 controllers is EXTREMELY low. Sub-10mb/s typically, with a high CPU load, as they don't have a dedicated XOR engine. Server-grade RAID5 controllers will give you good performance, but they cost in the $600-1000+ range, and when you're using consumer-grade 7200rpm SATA drives, you can buy half a dozen extra drives for the cost of the controller.ATWindsor - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
Software-raid has good read-performance if properly implmented, much better than a single drive. If you are going to have many drives, you must buy additional controllers anyway, so the price-difference isn't that big.