The HP MediaSmart Server stores files and distributes them to computers in the household over a home network. It needs no monitor, keyboard or mouse, but does need to be placed where you can plug it into a wall socket and a wired ethernet connection..

To most people a server is the person who takes your order and brings the drinks at a restaurant, but the word could soon take on a very different significance for anyone with computers at home.

In the world of information technology, a server is a powerful computer that sits in a central location and is networked to many other computers. However, in essence, it does almost the same thing as the restaurant worker: It serves up files to users on demand, sometimes to many users simultaneously.

Servers are essential components of any business network, and the internet couldn’t function without them. They’re sophisticated machines that have long been reserved for heavy-duty computing work within companies, institutions and the IT industry itself.

So it may come as a bit of a shocker to learn you may want to put one in your home in the next couple of years.

The gear

This is especially true if you have more than a couple of computers and several people who use them – mom, dad, kids, grandpa - in your household, or if you run a small business from home.

These days the amount of data stored on the multi-gigabyte hard drives of the average family's PCs rivals what would have circulated on a medium-sized company's network just a few years ago. Storing, distributing and backing up the growing volume of household documents, music files, digital video clips and photos is creating a burgeoning demand for servers in the home – one that computer makers are only too happy to cater to.

Last January Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard showed off a prototype of a home server that will start appearing in retail stores sometime before Christmas. The HP MediaSmart Server is a small box with some circuit boards and four hard drive bays, three of them empty. For the base version with a 250 gigabyte hard drive and Microsoft Home Server software installed, the projected retail price is $599. Additional hard drives can be bought as needed and currently cost about $200 for 750GB. The server needs no monitor, keyboard or mouse, but does require power and a wired connection to a home Ethernet.

The HP MediaSmart Server stores files and distributes them to computers in the household over a home network. It needs no monitor, keyboard or mouse, but does need to be placed where you can plug it into a wall socket and a wired ethernet connection.

And it’s a pretty cool tool.

"Here," says C.J. Saretto, Microsoft’s program lead manager for Windows Home Server, demonstrating the machine in New York recently. "I’m connecting to my own server in Colorado to access my vacation pictures."

And there they were on the screen, his family pictures. When your files are on a server that's connected to the internet, you can basically get to anything, anywhere, anytime.

HP is the first company to go to market with a formal product for the home running a full server operating system, but other companies have similar offerings – although so far these are more basic storage units that don’t use the new Microsoft Home Server software.

The closest thing on the market to it now is a type of gadget called a network-attached storage (NAS) device, made by a number of companies. A model from D-Link, for example, is essentially a box with two hard drive bays selling in the $200 range. You insert you own hard drives and the box makes their contents available to computers on your home network. It also has some software that allows secure internet access, file sharing and automated back up of the files on PCs connected to the network. Another approach is a box that connects to the home network, and which has USB or Firewire ports for connecting multiple external hard drives.

D-Link's DNS-323 is a network-attached storage (NAS) system with bays for two hard drives. It can share files over a home network, and has a built-in FTP server so that it can be set up for remote access over the internet.

Despite buzz that Dell, which makes low-cost servers for small business for about $500 to $600, is eyeing the home server market, it hasn’t formally announced any products. The company wouldn't comment for this article, but it would be surprising if Dell didn’t roll out something soon, since making the leap isn’t hard. The software used by its small-business machines is based on Microsoft's Small Business Server software, which is similar in many ways to Microsoft's Home Server package.

In fact, the big difference between Microsoft’s Small Business Server package and the Home Server is (thankfully) ease of use. Plug the server into the network, go to your main computer, insert the Home Server CD and install. The program finds the server on the network, sets up access, and from that point on the server hums away storing and distributing files on demand. You can put it anywhere you have network access, such as in the basement or under the stairs (although for security and speed reasons it isn’t set up for wireless, so you'll need to run a network cable to it from you home's router).

Once the server is running, you can access files on it in Windows by clicking on them in a directory, the same way you would use files and folders stored on your PC's own hard drive.

Microsoft's Home Server software is available to all manufacturers, and third-party developers are already looking at how they can tap in to the potential of the Home Server. Look for more announcements from both hardware and software vendors starting around Christmas and into the New Year, especially at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next January.

Microsoft designed its Home Server software to run on compact storage servers that can distribute files over wired and wireless home networks to other machines around the house, ranging from desktops and laptops to game consoles. People can also log-in to the server from the internet to access or back up things like music and photo files or documents. (Microsoft Corp.)

Target audience

The obvious question for most people, however, will be "why?" What is the average homeowner going to do with a server?

"Certainly it’s a nascent market, so it’s almost impossible to predict demand," says Eddie Chan, an analyst at IDC Canada, a market intelligence provider. " A lot will depend on how many vendors have offerings."

The average homeowner may not be lining up for a home server yet, but for the early adopter crowd it’s something of a Holy Grail. They've already seen the digital future, the one where we eschew going to the store to rent movies and download them instead; where sales of downloaded music eclipse CDs; and where their own user-generated content, their family videos and digital pictures, are outgrowing the storage space on their desktops and laptops.

The HP server with its four bays can store up to four terabytes of data based on the largest consumer hard drives available at the moment. That’s a mind-boggling 4,000GB of storage space, but we’ll need that capacity for things like downloaded HD movies if they catch on with consumers, as many are predicting. Whether we rent movies from the store or download them, the idea is for consumers to stream movies or recorded TV shows from the server, sending them over their home network to their TVs. "Smart" TV sets appearing on the market now can connect directly to a network, and there are also set-top boxes to handle the connection for sets that don't have an Ethernet port or wireless card built in. There are similar systems for streaming music and internet radio from a server to a home theatre.

As Saretto notes, people are going to want their digital content to be accessible anywhere and anytime, so storing it all in a central places makes sense. And to cut the risk of loss they want to back up any working files they have at home – pictures, documents, or work-related information – in a central location so they can be recovered easily if the computer is stolen or stops working.

These machines are also key to Microsoft’s vision of the smart home, the one where appliances, automated shutters, heating and air conditioning, security and entertainment are all controlled through interfaces spread through the house. It could be an LCD screen mounted by a wall switch, a "smart" TV or even a remote control that interacts with the home server to call up information or manage things such as lighting and temperature.

Software vendors are betting that there will be growing demand as home servers hit the mainstream retail market, and many are busy writing programs for them. There are already programs that record images from security cameras in your home if a motion detector is triggered. Some of the more sophisticated programs will send a text and/or e-mail alert to you as well, allowing you to log on anywhere you have internet access – including via your smart phone – to visually check on your property and determine if police need to be called. Home servers just make those third-party programs easier to set up.

Of course, there are detractors who echo Digital Equipment Corp. founder Ken Olsen's famous statement made way back in 1977 that, "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in the home." What he meant was not the personal computer, but a central computer that would control everything from the lights to the door locks, and he thought the concept was excessive.

And maybe a Home Server is an excess; a toy for toys’ sake that only geeks could love. But as files pile up and computers proliferate in the home, it may yet become another ubiquitous piece of personal technology, like the PC, the iPod, DVD player, internet connection and WiFi router.

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