HP's long-awaited Windows Home Server (WHS) products, the Mediasmart Server EX470 and EX475, will finally go on sale in UK shops from 1 December after a succession of delays.

The diminutive Mediasmart Server, priced from £399 (inc. Vat), was shown off at a low-key demo this morning by HP and Microsoft at London's BFI Southbank, where the customised HP version of the standard WHS console was evident.
HP has added in extra features such as Photo Webshare, which allows users to share photos via the built-in web server, and iTunes synchronisation to let users centralise their digital music library and make it available to all PCs on a home network.

Windows Home Server is based on Windows Server 2003 and is intended primarily to give home users a robust and foolproof way of backing up networked PCs. It also offers media sharing capabilities plus remote data access and remote PC control over the internet via a built-in web server application.

The EX470 and 475 models differ only in the amount of storage supplied as standard - the EX470 (£399 inc. Vat) has a single 500GB hard drive, with twin 500GB drives in the EX475 (£499 inc. Vat).

There are four internal hot-swap drives bays and four USB2 ports for adding external storage, giving a maximum capacity of 9 terabytes according to HP. Both models are powered by an AMD Sempron 1.8GHz processor.

It remains to be seen how well the 'soft launch' strategy for WHS adopted by Microsoft will work. WHS is a difficult product to explain to the uninitiated, sitting as it does between a network attached storage (NAS) device and a traditional file or application server.