Inside Microsoft’s high-performance NAS for small businesses

Earlier this month, I highlighted the Windows Home Server 2011 as a good option for the smallest of businesses, including home offices, mom-and-pop shops with fewer than 10 employees, and organizations that simply need a place for unified storage protection. I still believe it’s a good option in those really small situations, but many organizations need to kick things up a notch. You might think that next notch would be Small Business Server Essentials or Standard, but Microsoft has a new offering in the Windows Storage Server (WSS) family called WSS 2008 R2 Essentials that may be a better option for a small-business environment.

Keep in mind that all these server products are built on the Windows Server 2008 R2 platform. Whether you’re looking at Windows Home Server, Small Business Server, or (in this case) Windows Storage Server Essentials NAS appliance, you’re getting the core Windows Server 2008 R2 under the hood.

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WSS Essentials is appropriate for organizations with no more than 25 users and that are primarily focused on centralized storage and easy backup/recovery for desktop clients and the server’s data itself — which sounds an awful lot like the same outfits that would consider Windows Home Server.

I asked Michael Leworthy of Microsoft’s Windows Server marketing team why an organization might choose WSS Essentials instead of Windows Home Server. His response intrigued me because it exposed a flaw in my thinking about small businesses. In a nutshell, PC makers will provide WSS Essentials on better computers and with better storage than the products that ship with Wndows Home Server.

Although it’s true that some small businesses don’t require the best hardware to operate, many others have the desire and/or need to purchase a high-performance server. That’s the kind of small business that should be looking at WSS Essentials instead of Windows Home Server.

There are also some differences in the server software that may play into the decision, even though both are designed for nonexpert IT admins and provide the same Remote Web Access capabilities, simplified setup and management dashboard, and support for Small Business Server third-party add-ins. For starters, WSS Essentials allows for more seats than Windows Home Server (25 versus 10), and WSS Essentials supports Active Directory domain join options so that you can snap the Essentials appliance into existing infrastructure and networks. Plus, WSS Essentials supports commercial security and storage apps, whereas WHS supports consumer apps to enhance only the media and storage functionality — in other words, WSS Essentials is designed for business rather than for the home.

Of course, if you have more than 10 users, you might be looking at some kind of line-of-business support, which means Small Business Server Essentials would be a better choice for on-premise Active Directory access security than WSS Essentials. But if you simply need client backup and centralized storage, WSS Essentials nicely fits the bill. And the domain join allows you to migrate to more capable server product if you later require more advanced capabilities.

Microsoft loves providing multiple versions of its products, which can be confusing. That’s the case for Windows Storage Server and its three other versions beyond WSS Essentials:

• WSS 2008 R2 Workgroup, which features block storage (iSCSI Software Target 3.3) — important for application servers such SQL and Exchange.
• WSS 2008 R2 Standard, which includes all the features of WSS Essentials and WSS Workgroup, plus has unlimited capacity and user seats; can work as a branch office server as a read-only domain controller with WINS, DNS and, DHCP support; and comes with single-instance storage (SIS) capabilities.
• WSS 2008 R2 Enterprise, which includes all the features of WSS Standard and allows for high-availability clustering and BranchCache technology.

Microsoft has published the nitty-gritty details at its TechNet site.

I have to admit that from my vantage point as an admin who typically builds his own boxes (or buys expensive hardware) and installs the software himself, I didn’t see the need for WSS Essentials. But from a small-business perspective, you want it to be easy and you want it to be supported should something go wrong. If my tailored server setup breaks, it all falls to me to fix. For many small businesses, that is a deal breaker, so support from the vendor is a big plus for a WSS Essentials box.

Pricing is also an issue for many small businesses that simply can’t afford people like me. Microsoft suggests that a WSS Essentials system will be cheaper than even buying your own hardware and installing Wimdows Home Server, due to aggressive discounts Microsoft gives to PC makers that sell WSS Essentials servers.

The trick for customers is to know they’re even getting WSS Essentials. That’s because buyers may not even see the WSS Essentials name in the hardware product names, as each PC maker is using its own names for these hardware-and-software systems. But whatever a WSS Essentials box is callled when they begin shipping in the coming weeks, I believe this entry-level NAS option will carve out its own space in between Server and Small Business Server.

This article, “Inside Microsoft’s high-performance NAS for small businesses,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of J. Peter Bruzzese’s Enterprise Windows blog and follow the latest developments in Windows at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.