Well, sort of. Microsoft's already affordable operating system for small businesses - Windows Server Essentials 2012 R2 - typically costs around £300. But you can now buy a server - sort of - with a copy of Essentials already loaded on it for just £300 in the shape of the Thecus W2000. So what's going on? The answer, and the reason for the 'sort of' references above, is that it is being sold as a NAS or Networked Attached Storage device, rather than as a 'server' |
And that's where Thecus steps in, as the first manufacturer to do so. Thecus are a Taiwanese manufacturer of storage products, not as large or well known as Synology and QNAP but still highly regarded. They have launched 3 models that come with Storage Essentials: the W2000, W4000 and W5000. The lowest priced model is the W2000, a dual-bay machines based around an Intel Atom processor, 2GB RAM and twin Gigabit Ethernet adaptors. Although a modest enough specification, it is quite adequate to cope with the demands of a small business. Storage Essentials is supplied pre-loaded on a 64GB SSD; the user needs to add two conventional larger drives for data storage and the Storage Spaces facility (also in Windows 8) can be used to add resilience, analogous to RAID. At the time of writing, the W2000 is listed on Amazon for just £299.
The benefit of a Windows-based NAS is the familiarity of the operating system as, at the end of the day, it is not that different from regular Windows. This will make it attractive to many people. Plus it can integrate with Office 365 for email and with Azure for cloud-based backups. It is certainly a more capable platform than most Linux-based NAS operating systems, but also more complex. Despite the blurb, it is nowhere near the 'appliance' model that the top NAS manufacturers are getting close to. There will be a number of them looking over their shoulders whilst they ascertain the nature of this new threat from Microsoft.