In listening to MacBreak Weekly 25, it hit me that the new 802.11n AirPort Extreme base station could very well be the first Apple home server. In some sense, it could compete against Windows Home Server (see a preview here), which was announced at CES.
Let’s think about backup, which is one of the neat features announced with WHS. We know that Mac OS X Leopard is supposed to include Time Machine. Time Machine is going to eat drive space; to keep your current data plus historical data—so you can go back and forth in time—you’ll need more storage than you have internal in most single-drive Macs. You can do this with a local drive or a network drive, although I’ve seen no public information on the requirements for network access. (Apple coyly says only, “Or back up to a Mac OS X server computer,” on the Leopard preview pages.) It could be a shared AFP volume or it could be a disk image on a network share—that information simply isn’t public yet so let’s not speculate.
We know that the AirPort Extreme base station has a USB 2.0 port for attaching a drive. The attached drive can be shared for Mac and Windows, according to Apple, which implies AFP and SMB/CIFS support. You can set up accounts and access controls. (Oh, by the way, it still offers printer sharing.)
It’s in providing the share points that AirPort Extreme could enable over-the-network Time Machine backups for one or more computers. That would compete with WHS.
There is suspicion that the base station could be running a similar embedded “OS X” to the iPhone. This could account for the file sharing, print sharing, accounts, and access controls features; these are already part of Mac OS X today.
Now, I’m going to extrapolate. Let’s assume one could hook up a USB 2.0 hub to the base station. That implies that you could connect several devices, possibly even multiple drives—whereas right now, Apple advertises only a single “USB 2.0 port for connecting a USB printer or USB external hard drive.” [My emphasis.] This might not be ideal if you don’t have a good, consumer-friendly way to manage that storage.
Enter a new volume format. What if ZFS ever comes to the “OS X” platform, as many hope it will in Leopard? Wouldn’t it make sense to connect multiple drives, bundle them into a ZFS storage pool to provide scaling and redundancy, and then share them out?
It’s at that completely hypothetical wishful-thinking point that the AirPort Extreme base station competes more capably as a home server against WHS and my new Infrant ReadyNAS NV+. The others both have on-the-fly expansion capabilities that are not advertised for the AirPort Extreme. Assuming you just need AFP or the ability to store a disk image—a big but reasonable “if” at this point—then a multi-drive ZFS-based AirPort Extreme network storage solution would be a grow-with you home server.
Note that Microsoft itself mentions WHS as being a good host for Time Machine backups in the preview I linked to above.
It’s too bad the LAN Ethernet ports on the AirPort Extreme are only 100 Mbit.
Hm, only time will tell how this will play out.