QNAP is the industry leader of inexpensive network attached storage devices. So far all the units have featured a maximum of 8 hard drives and 2 network cards. However this is about to change as QNAP already has units with more hard drives and network cards in development and in limited production runs. So far we know of at least one unit which is a going to feature 10 hard drives and will possibly be able to utilize both – SATA and SAS hard drives. The use of SAS drives in QNAP device will significantly improve data access and transfer times between the device and other network equipment. Since SAS is mostly used in enterprise environment, where iSCSI is the choice of protocol for connecting servers – QNAP has also decided to increase the network performance by configuring the new units with four gigabit network cards. SAS drives, quad network cards combined with service binding to the NICs, iSCSI snapshoting (backup and restore), faster processor and more memory in the units will push QNAP into enterprise grade category and will make it suitable for mission critical system where performance is an important factor.
Such configuration will make future QNAP offerings the perfect backup storage and low cost iSCSI expansion storage. For example ability to write data quickly via iSCSI over multiple nics to SAS drives will make backup times with Veeam faster as one will be able to push several backup streams at the same time without fear of QNAP being the bottleneck.
We are eagerly awaiting on the announcement of the new devices which is expected to happen around end of October or beginning of November of 2011.
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