QNAP Enterprise ZFS NAS Series: Product Overview and Insight

See the full list of 8 Best Enterprise NAS Devices

Bottom line:

Buyers based in the US may not be familiar with the QNAP name – it’s not a familiar name for many outside of Asia. Yet SMB buyers shouldn’t let the relatively unknown brand name deter them: the company has put together a powerful NAS line that will give some of the established players a run for their money.

Performance is very good, and ranges toward very high uptime. To be sure, the QNAP doesn’t scale as well as some of the others NAS units on this list. But with a large handful of bays for dedicated caching, this is a top contender for small and mid-range implementations.

Company description:

QNAP Systems, headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan, provides a range of NAS and video surveillance solutions based on the principles of usability, high security, and flexible scalability. QNAP offers NAS products for home and business users, providing solutions for storage, backup/snapshot, virtualization, teamwork, multimedia, and more.

Product description:

QNAP promises that its Enterprise ZFS NAS Series will provide nearly zero downtime. It’s optimized for mission-critical virtualized workloads, particularly virtual desktop infrastructure, and it offers features like nearly limitless snapshots, block-level data deduplication, thin provisioning with reclaim and simplified management. It uses the QNAP Enterprise Storage (QES) operating system and supports the ZFS file system. There are two models:

The TES-3085U is the top-of-the-line model. It supports either the FreeBSD-based QES OS or Linux-based QTS OS. QES supports ZFS for the high reliability and allows near-limitless snapshots, block-level data deduplication and real-time data compression. QTS features Qtier Technology, SSD cache, and an value-added apps to realize storage efficiency and usage applications. The TES-3085U provides all-flash storage with up to 24 disk bays and 6 dedicated SSDs bays for caching.

The class TES-1885U is also open for the same two operating systems. It includes a mixture of HDDs and SSDs.

Key Features:

• Intel Xeon 6-core Processor E5-2420 v2

• Dual active controllers

• 2 GB/64 GB main memory + 16 GB write cache per controller

• Support for up to 500 VDI instances

• Five-year warranty

RAID/Data Protection features:

• RAID 0/1/5/6/10/50/60/TP/TM,

• up to 65,536 snapshots,

• SnapSync backup/restore

Storage Saving Features:

• Data deduplication,

• compression, thin provisioning

Data Management features:

• Capacity expansion with REXP expansion unit series

• All flash storage optimization,

• QoS (to be introduced with upcoming QES update)

Implementation:

Easy to implement. One reviewer said, “Maintenance is a cinch with field replacement units and technical support amply provided by QNAP and its resellers.”

Technical support:

5-year warranty with complimentary global warranty for the first 3 years.

Capacity:

160 TB TES-1885U with 8 REXP-1620U-RP expansion units; total 140 drives, 12 TB each Raw capacity: 1.68 PB.

Performance:

Up to 500k IOPS, 2.3 GB/s and less than 5 ms latency.

Markets and Use Cases:

• IT departments with needs of virtual machine storage, shared storage and backup storage will likely use this. 

• Virtual desktop infrastructure is another key use case for the QNAP.

Delivery:

Rackmount appliance.

Price:

TES-3085U: $4,699 to $6,099 (different processor and memory options available) TES-1885U: $3,499 to $4,699 (different processor and memory options available)