CES 2009: When (if ever) will home servers shine?
Though undeniably useful, NAS (network-attached-storage) products thus far have proven difficult for consumers to grasp and implement. Will the category ever catch fire in the mass market?
By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor -- EDN, January 7, 2009
As is often the case, I've been a technology early-adopter with respect to home (and SOHO for that matter, since I have a home-based office) NAS (network-attached storage). Considering that I've been dabbling with network storage gear for a decade, though, you might think that by now consumer NAS would have either withered on the vine or blossomed into a broadly embraced product category. That neither spectrum-of-adoption endpoint has come to pass tells me two things:
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The technology is compelling enough that it's cultivated a sufficiently large enthusiast base to keep it on life support, but
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The concept isn't sufficiently intuitive to ensure must-have purchase by a larger population of consumers, and/or the implementations haven't been sufficiently intuitive to ensure long-term adoption (along with subsequent advocacy to the next level of friends, acquaintances, and family members).
This is the second day of the Storage Visions show preceding CES. Microsoft aggressively promoted its Windows Home Server NAS O/S at last year's show (a campaign that was largely neutered by the concurrent discovery of a nasty file-corruption bug that took many months to fix, likely because most of Microsoft's software engineers were otherwise focused on getting higher-leverage Windows Vista SP1, Windows XP SP3, and Windows Server 2008 out the door). Both factoids rationalize an in-depth exploration of the NAS topic at this time. Numerous NAS suppliers (coming from both hard-drive and networking heritages, along with plenty of previously unaffiliated companies) are in attendance here in Las Vegas, and the product category is of equivalent interest to many other CES-attending vendors hungry for tangible incremental business opportunities: HDD and CPU manufacturers (the latter both x86 and other), and developers of DRAM, Ethernet, and other silicon and software building blocks.
To my mind, home NAS applications cluster into a few high-level categories:
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General-purpose shared access to generic files for reading, updating, and other management tasks
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The specific ability to access multimedia files (music tracks, pictures, and video clips) via UPnP/DLNA, Bonjour, and other discovery protocols, over TCP, UDP and other transport protocols, and by various LAN-connected clients (general-purpose computers, dedicated media extenders, handheld devices, etc.).
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An expanded ability to share files with others around the world over a broadband WAN link to the NAS, and
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Full and incremental backup of computers' valuable stored information, to account for inevitable HDD demise.
At first glance, the market opportunity for NAS in the home might seem robust and ripe, judging from the booming sales of routers suggestive of an expanding home LAN ecosystem. My admittedly unscientific regular surveys of friends and family members, however, suggest otherwise. The overwhelmingly dominant (and solitary) use of a router in most homes, my research suggests, is to enable shared access to a common Internet connection. Much less frequently, consumers take their LANs to the next level, that of sharing a networked printer.
Unfortunately, though, the concept of enabling computers to talk to each other for file-sharing purposes seems to be beyond the intuitive grasp of most consumers. Shared access to a common storage "pool" is equally alien. This dark cloud does have a silver lining; each time I've pointed out to someone that computer-to-computer and computer-to-networked storage communication is possible, along with explaining (even if only briefly) the advantages of such a scheme, the light bulb immediately goes on and they enthusiastically embrace and implement (and subsequently regularly employ) the idea. This result suggests that a little advocacy of the concept of networked storage in the home by relevant vendors and industry groups will go a long way toward achieving the desired end result.
NAS's lingering IT heritage, translating to consumer-unfriendly setup schemes and other overly techie issues, doesn't help. To that point, Oxford Semiconductor (representatives of which I met with yesterday, and which, thanks in part to recent purchaser PLX Technology, is aggressively moving beyond its FireWire direct-attached storage roots toward both USB3-based DAS and Ethernet-based NAS, the latter exemplified by a just-introduced Iomega storage device implementation, pictured at left) is advocating a renaming of the acronym to "Network Accessible Storage." Similarly, I suspect that whereas the bulk of today's consumer NAS business is supplied by legacy storage firms, over the long term two alternative and more consumer-cognizant vendor categories will dominate; networking equipment companies such as Cisco/Linksys, D-Link, and Netgear (in no small part because I suspect that HDD-inclusive routers will become increasingly prevalent in the future), along with computer OS providers like Apple and Microsoft. More on that latter category in a bit.
With respect to NAS's intra-LAN media-sharing facility, the longstanding codec and protocol incompatibilities between source and destination devices have unfortunately been a recurring theme in my print and online hands-on evaluation reports over the years. Note Monday's writeup, for example, or a piece I crafted last summer in conjunction with a trip to Taiwan. Single-vendor network topologies are inherently less prone to such problems, and as such I was a little surprised that Apple didn't unveil a media server during yesterday's Macworld Expo keynote. Granted, Apple's routers do already support USB-tethered HDDs, and the company's also done a decent job of making intra-Mac media sharing simple. But I still expect Apple to eventually unveil either a NAS-centric device or a multimedia-optimized version of the current router-plus-HDD Time Capsule. Don't expect NAS-housed data access to extend beyond the LAN, though, as that would negate consumers' need for a lucrative-to-Apple $100/year MobileMe (previously .Mac) subscription.
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Business-induced hobbles aside, inter-LAN (i.e. WAN) access to personal multimedia information is also hampered by two fundamental problems (along with a host of lesser ones): security and bandwidth. Punching a hole through a router firewall is no simple task, although UPnP autoconfiguration certainly helps...when it works correctly, that is. And the dynamic IP address schemes germane to most consumer broadband links make it difficult if not impossible to find the server even if the firewall breach is successful. To these points, I'll particularly credit the approach chosen by Microsoft, whose Windows Home Server embeds a dynamic DNS client that operates in conjunction with a free user-selectable custom domain URL. Implementation strengths and shortcomings aside, ISPs don't particularly welcome the security implications of such a firewall circumvention, and they definitely don't welcome the notable incremental upstream bandwidth cultivated by a LAN-housed, WAN-accessible server.Automatic backup conversely reveals an Achilles heel of Microsoft's Windows Home Server scheme (the current one, at least). The Connector computer client-side utility is, perhaps not surprisingly, Windows-only, and it operates by automatically waking up the PC every 24 hours in order to execute the backup task. Such an approach doesn't make it amenable to situations like mine where Windows is running virtualized. And even when Windows is the native OS, the implementation isn't glitch-free; one of my laptop computers, for example, consistently refused to go back to sleep (as it was supposed to) after the backup completed. I'm more impressed with the Time Machine backup algorithm that Apple has baked into OS 10.5 ("Leopard"), although again it's OS X-only (and unlike with iTunes and MobileMe, Apple has little motivation to broaden the Time Machine embrace to encompass rival Windows).
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Interesting article. I've had a NAS (Snap Server) on my home LAN for years. Almost never use it. Although the server seemed to run fine, my combination of computers - XP Pro ; XP Home ; and an old Win 98 machine - would never reliably peer-to-peer with each other. Sometimes things would work, but then machines would disappear (although still internet connected through the router), taking the server connections down too. Basically, gave up trying to use it, except when I (seldom) think to do a manual backup. Too bad - it really should be a valuable function.
Fred - 2009-7-1 16:27:00 PST -
Dear x-acto, ambient noise level is certainly not something I've overlooked! I realize in retrospect that I didn't mention it, but the incremental din of the ReadyNAS over the inherently quieter NAS200 is another factor in my consideration of its possible retirement. For more: www.edn.com/blog/400000040/post/1890024789.html, www.edn.com/blog/400000040/post/310025031.html, www.edn.com/blog/400000040/post/1950026595.html. Unfortunately, SSDs don't yet have the cost structure to hit the necessary price points at the capacity points that consumers demand
Brian Dipert - 2009-7-1 15:08:00 PST -
I too, have been an early adopter of a Windows Home Server system for the past year. I have tried to use it for the same purposes you suggest with mixed success. The file sharing within the house works great. Each computer has access to all the files on the server. The backup works great on 3 out of 4 of machines, but the 4th machine thinks it doesn't have an NTFS file system (even though it does).
I have never been able to figure out how to get the Dynamic DNS to work right. I understand the router configuration and everything looks good, but I still get "Connection Refused" from somewhere in the communications chain. I can't tell where.
I consider myself a pretty sophisticated user, but some of these areas still seem pretty cryptic and have way too many people involved (server vendor, TZO.com, ISP, router vendor, Microsoft, etc.) when there is a question or something isn't working right.
I agree that these devices work pretty well when they work, but I wouldn't try to help my mother set one up over the phone!
Mike N - 2009-7-1 13:59:00 PST -
Great Article, gets the point right.
One other aspect that is still being overlooked by most NAS manufacturers is the noise level produced by the appliance and/or its respective cooling system (read: air moving fan(s)).
The days of having air conditioner sized cabinets producing soda vending machine noise levels should be a thing on the past. For the longest time the main offender was the rotary hard drive, but those are now pretty quiet (as long as they are properly mounted and enclosed). The new source of noise is now coming from the switching power supply or large IC cooling fan(s) exacerbated by poor thermal designs that attempt to cool down the devices with little regard of the customer noise tolerance (ie: X cfm of air can be achieved with a really small (1.25") fan rotating at high (3K) rpm -more noise- or by a medium sized fan (3")rotating at medium (800) rpm -less noise-.
This make the NAS an "appliance non-gratta" in most bedrooms or serious music listening rooms. Not everyone has extra closets or remotely located rooms to "hide" or isolate such noisy equipment.
Perhaps in addition to the ease of use, interface, codec, and LAN/WAN accessibility the NAS manufacturers should perform a comprehensive "Voice of the Customer" to help them gather the real life requirements to be used for designing their products,
instead of just taking several network appliances -that would usually be "hidden" in a computer/IT closet- and integrated them into a single cabinet, but with only the basic enterprise IT needs as their design requirements.
By the way, even the type of inductors and capacitors used in the NAS should be optimized to prevent the typical very high-pitched "whine" found in poorly designed electronics. (listen carefully to a network router or switch in a very quiet room and you''ll see what I mean).
The ideal NAS would have a Solid State Hard Drive and no cooling fans (read: completely quiet and thermally
cool with no openings for trapping dust).
x_acto - 2009-7-1 13:48:00 PST -
I think you will find the more recent products from Buffalo are better than your 2005 22-screw version. I have had a Terastation Pro I running in a mixed XP/OSX environment for 2 years full-time. They have made great strides for easy swap-out. I fear the inevitable first disk crash, but I have 2 drives from different timeframes ready to go when it does.
Dan Deisz - 2009-7-1 13:15:00 PST
