Having just been to SMBSummit in Dallas, the love that was expressed among the Koolaid drinkers for Home Server was in my view, missing a critical component – transparency from Microsoft on data corruption issues.
I purchased WHS a few months ago, and have it running right beside me with 2 500GB enterprise Seagate SATA drives. I was also brave enough to install WSS3.0 on it – it works, but haven’t played with it much.
In fact, I’m afraid to play with it. Every time I do, the WHS icon in my system tray turns yellow (or red) to tell me there’s a problem. Invariably, one or both of the drive volumes are ‘failing’, and I need to run a disk repair from the WHS console to get it back to good health (which also requires a reboot – not so automatic).
Pain in the patootie, and it doesn’t do much to build my confidence in the product.
In Dallas, the WHS presentation by Microsoft and one of the partners had several people for Q&A lined up at the mic. The potential of the product for SOHO clients is obvious, and everyone wants to know more. When I stood up and asked the presenters if they had experienced the ‘failing volume’ issue, there was a pause, shuffling of feet, sips of koolaid all around, and then a ‘sure we have – no big deal, just run a repair’. OK. Every day?
Paul Thurrott has expressed his concerns as well in his Windows Weekly podcast on more than 1 occasion, and his views are bang-on. Microsoft has to do more to represent the product properly. Right now, they are presenting the product as client-ready, and droves of partners are heading out to sell the stuff to unsuspecting clients, not necessarily knowing there are data corruption problems. Can anyone say ‘beta-test’?
At the vendor night in Dallas, I stopped to speak with the Home Server folks, and when I asked about when the issue was going to be fixed, I received a ‘huh? what problem’ response.
I’ve heard through acquaintances in the industry that beta’s of the upcoming Power Pack do fix the issues, and the problem really only affects multi-drive systems (which is kind of the ‘big feature’ thing anyway), but I’d much rather see Microsoft step forward publicly and ‘fess up. Clamming up when there is a problem with your solution doesn’t send a very good message.
It’s a cool product, and one that I sincerely hope will shed all of it’s data / drive corruption issues with the upcoming Power Pack, but having used it personally for a few months, I’m not ready to recommend it to anyone who has my phone number.
Step up Microsoft. It’s the right thing to do.
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