The answer for your home data center problem is obvious: you need a single storage device that each machine, whether Windows, Mac, or Linux, can use. In short, you need NAS. This solves the islands of storage problem. It also solves the not-every-platform problem. But what to use for your home data center NAS?

You can build your own. There are a bunch of Linux-based open source offerings around. But that makes you a Linux system administrator, probably not what you wanted. You want something simple.

Major vendors provide NAS devices, often called something else. , for example, just announced the , a product that provides centralized storage and helps with another aspect of today's home data center: sharing media among computers and other media devices (e.g., your TV). However, this product is based on Windows, giving you yet another Windows machine to manage, one with all of your important data, to boot. I'm not sure that's where I want to go.

Buffalo, , and others offer Linux-based NAS devices that insulate you from the down-and-dirty system administration tasks associated with the Linux roll-your-own solutions. This gets around the stability issue. But you're still faced with two problems: (1) you've got centralized storage, but it's still in your home data center, so you have no disaster recovery protection; and (2) home NAS devices are significantly more expensive than typical external storage. I'm not sure I understand why -- after all, consumer wireless routers are also special purpose Linux devices, but they're dirt cheap. Why should marrying an external drive with a custom Linux distro cost five times what a wireless router costs?

So here's my modest proposal for an offering to solve all of these problems: a NAS device that is delivered at a low price point, with a monthly fee built in to provide remote (e.g., Mozy-like) backup bundled in. The vendor would buy down the initial price based on the monthly fees provided for in the contract. In essence, this product would replicate the typical mobile phone arrangement-and we've seen how this has powered mobile phone adoption.