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Home servers latest trend to sweep market?
Hard drives not enough for 'terabyte generation'

By Reuters

Published: Monday 21 July 2008

Soon, the 500GB hard drive that comes as standard on most home computers today won't even be big enough to store and organise the amount of digital music, video and photography that users are accumulating as part of the emerging "terabyte lifestyle".

That opens the door to a new market, one that for now remains a niche afterthought to most people: home servers.

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Most digital media today is stored on an individual computer and then synched to one device or another or streamed through a home network to an entertainment system or other appliance. The drawback with such a system is that all files will be lost should the hard drive crash, and it's very difficult to synchronise files across multiple computers, devices and users without overlap.

By contrast, a home server acts as a central storage hub for all the content in the home, and multiple devices can link to it in order to stream or otherwise access music, video or other content. A home server will even automatically back up and reconcile content stored on any connected device. And servers are far less prone to crashes.

The home server market is currently all potential, with only an estimated 400,000 US households employing one today, according to multiple analyst reports.

But Forrester Research projects the US market will grow to more than 4.5 million households by 2012, while the Diffusion Group predicts it surging to as high as 21.5 million in all of North America by 2015.

Driving this growth is digital content. It's hard to measure just how much content is now stored on home computers but, based on reported activity, it's certainly on the rise. A Forrester Research survey shows that the number of people viewing or managing photos on their computers rose from 26 per cent of survey respondents in 2002 to 47 per cent in 2007.

Analyst JP Gownder says: "The digital assets that people have are clearly climbing and with that comes the potential need for a home server." Diffusion Group senior analyst Ted Theocheung notes that the average computer user will have up to two terabytes of content stored by 2010.

But increased storage capacity is not enough to jump-start the market. The real appeal of the home server is its synching, streaming and management capabilities. The more devices in the house that need access to the same content, the more need there is for a home server.

According to Forrester, the number of homes with multiple computers increased from 25.8 million in 2002 to 47.8 million last year. These computers are increasingly being connected via a home network, the penetration of which has doubled in the same time period from 12 per cent to 24 per cent. And that's not even including the proliferation of iPods, mobile phones and other portable devices that need access as well.

Microsoft, and its Windows Home Server software that it launched in January, is expected to rule the home server market for the next five years, during which PC-based servers will be the dominant solution. But Theocheung says the real spike in consumer adoption won't come until after consumer electronics companies begin building server-like functions into their entertainment system products, which will overtake the PC as the primary source of such store-and-synch capability. In particular, he expects cable operators to be leaders in this transition, doing for servers what they did for DVRs by including the functionality in set-top boxes.

Theocheung said: "That changes the whole model. If you have to buy these yourself, the trend is going to be slower. But when service providers latch onto this and let you just add $5 to your $100 monthly cable bill, it's not a noticeable impact. Then you're going to see some action."