Announced back in January at Consumer Electronics Show, Windows Home Server is ready to make its debut on the market, with partners like Fujitsu Siemens or HP.

Just as the name suggests, Windows Homer Server is a hardware and software solution for families who have more than one computer in the house and wish to store their data and access it easily from separate accounts.

The WHS originates from Charlie Kindel’s idea from 1999 (which is now general manager at Microsoft for WHS), which later transformed into project “Quattro” (in 2004). Kindel describes Windows Home Server as “a labor of love for over 8 years”, and apparently he has won a bet with himself and his development team that the software application would ship in the first half of 2007.

“We made some mistakes…and corrected them. We took a few risks…and they paid off.  In April 2005 we said we’d ship V1 in the first half of 2007. It wasn’t always easy and it wasn’t always fun, but we said what we were going to do and then we did it. You know what they say…the fourth time’s a charm.  Congratulations and thanks for helping ship the coolest version of Windows ever: Windows Home Server.”

During the 2-year beta-testing period, more than 100,000 engineers and developers have been involved and this should give us a hint on how important WHS is for Microsoft. The Redmond behemoth targets a potential market of more than 50 million families out there, all in need of a central storage device where each member of the family can store pictures, personal files, movies, etc. and even back-up the content on their separate hard drives.

According to Kindle, hardware requirements for Windows Home Server are quite meager: an x86 CPU with roughly the same horsepower as a 1GHz Pentium III (although it can even run on lower specs, like a 550MHz Pentium III for example), at least 512MB of system RAM (1GB recommended), a cheap video card (not necessarily very powerful, but you should keep in mind that some onboard GPUs utilize the system’s RAM), a DVD ROM, an Ethernet adapter (WHS will work fine though on 100baseT…) and at least an 80GB HDD (“you will want the largest disks you can find and multiple of them (in order to get redundancy).  I won't go into the details of why here, but you should make sure that your first disk (disk 0) is NOT your smallest disk.  For example if you have 3 120GB disks and an 80GB disk lying around, DO NO put the 80GB disk as the first disk.”)

Of course, a system that supports USB 2.0 is recommended (1.0 would be too slow) and WHS does NOT require a mouse or a keyboard to run, but they are needed at install.

Microsoft has begun shipping the application to its OEM partners, including HP, Iomega, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Gateway, LaCie and Medion.

According to Kindle, “the evaluation version (with 120 day evaluation period) and the system builder version are also heading into the distribution channels and will be available in the next couple of months. French, German and Spanish versions will be finalized shortly, and OEM products will hit retail shelves this fall.”