Well, well, well. 

I already run a HP DataVault X510 which I purchased at TechEd a few years back. At the time Windows Home Server was fairly new, and considerably feature rich. Imagine a time where PLEX didn't exist, nor were NAS boxes particularly powerful enough to do media duties or feature rich in general.

The DataVault solved a few issues for me at the time - remote access to files and folders, 4 drive bays, media encoding - and a pretty seamless backup service which would wake my PCs and Laptops as required. It was a pretty solid option (at the time).

However, the problems I soon found were:
1) No video output on the server hardware - so upgrading operating systems or re-purposing for Linux without a diagnostic board would prove to be an absolute nightmare. (Picture attached)
2) The version of Windows Home Server used some type of soft-raid and weirdo 'folder duplication', which made it impossible to know if your data was really safe.
3) In September of this year the primary system drive started to freeze up randomly during backups, and fearing the worst was coming, I cloned it 1:1 to a new 1TB drive which seems to have solved the problem. However, as far as scares are concerned - it had got me thinking about a replacement with more flexibility.

Given the 24/7 punishment of this consumer orientated HP kit, the fact that the only failing component was the Seagate HD, and despite a very old and buggy operating system, I still rate and recommend the HP hardware.

So in conclusion yes, I'm very interested in this new piece of kit from HP.. So much so that I'd be willing to exchange the old X510 for this new Gen8 Microserver instead! Or more in-line with paying it forward, if I were to win the Gen8, I'll do a system restore and donate the still very useful X510 to a Charity or Primary School.