QNAP gets serious with Turbo NAS line, packing Pineview, iSCSI, and VMWare certification
By Tim Stevens 
posted January 4th 2010 7:49AM
posted January 4th 2010 7:49AM
QNAP is generally known around these parts for its ever shrinking line of NAS devices that pack plenty of goods in a small space. The company's latest series sets a new bar for functionality, but does so in a device you probably won't be wedging in on a bookshelf between your well-worn (but never finished) copy of Ulysses and your leaning tower of software boxes. The latest Turbo NAS series is intended for small businesses, available in sizes ranging from one to the eight bay monster you see above, each packing an Intel D510 processor with enough oomph to fuel virtualized environments, so VMware vSphere4 certification and Windows Server 2008's Hyper-V are on-tap. iSCSI is also supported, as is IPv6 and, in one small nod toward consumers, Apple Time Machine backups have been enabled. We're expecting to see the full suite of devices at CES just a few days hence, while they're all slated for retail release in the coming weeks at prices ranging from $599 for the two-bay TS-259 Pro all the way up to $1,499 for that eight-bay TS-859 Pro flavor. You didn't think all this professionalism would come cheap, did you?
finally, a proper NAS box I can use in all-mac Video Production studio
By "ever shrinking" I assume you mean physical size and not "ever shrinking line" - since QNAP has basically doubled it's product line over the past year.
I own two TS-639's - and I can't say enough great things about them! Especially for mixed environments and great Mac/Linux support.
@avvidme I couldn't agree more.
I took a chance early last year and bought a QNAP TS-639. I was comparing it to the Netgear ReadyNAS line and the QNAP won because it was a few hundred dollars cheaper, but still built like a tank.
At the time of purchase the Netgear had a prettier UI, but after trying out the demo on their site I discovered it was very klutzy and used java all over the place.
Then a few months down the road QNAP sent out an updated UI that is leaps and bounds over their old interface. It's much prettier to look at it.
That aside, I really enjoy the device because it just works with my Mac, Windows, and Linux machines. They're constantly adding new features (the Apple Time Machine support got added to our devices as well, so its not like you have to run out and upgrade to this new one just to get that, which is awesome).
Also the support and user community is above average as well, sometimes a slight language barrier but very knowledgeable and quick to respond.
As of this writing my device has 3x1TB WD Black drives inside of it in RAID5 and has been running for 153 days happily.
I access it via my PS3, Xbox 360, and Mac Mini (using Plex as a front end) for streaming audio and video. My iTunes library also lives on the device. My Mac mini does bittorrent and the files are automatically saved to the Qnap as well.
- D
sweet :) .... definitelly a must buy for me ...
... i wonder if i can install debian on that thing to perform as a small server ?!?!?
$1,499 isn't inexpensive, but it *definitely* seems like a good value for what this eight-bay box is capable of. One should expect to pay well for robust hardware.
I've used QNAP devices for many clients of mine with great results...very configurable, great user interface (especially compared to Netgear's ReadyNAS UI), and rock-solid performance. Price isn't bad either, and even the lower-end 2-drive models give you many more features for the same price as the other guys.
can anyone comment on what the vmware / hyperV certification actually means?
i there anything that i get over and above my Thecus N7700 (apart from an extra drive) - http://blog.collins.net.pr/2008/10/thecus-n7700.html
which is now over a year old (and cheaper to boot?)
@deancollins From the product feature list, " The NAS can be utilized as the networked shared storage of VMware virtualization environments and Windows cluster servers.". Basically to do anything fun with VM's you need to have centralized storage. They're just saying this is certified for that use. It seems quite speedy according to their specs, 100MB Raid5 disk speed, and 570Mb network. Wonder how much that slows in say a 10-20 user environment (ie as a VM cluster storage).
@deancollins
Almost certainly just means they'll provide support if your VMware setup has problems using this for storage. Lots of the trick VMware stuff such as hot migration (cutting a running VM over to another piece of physical hardware with no more than a lost ping or two) rely on shared iSCSI storage.
Sounds like it will already work, they're just getting certification for it to be 'official'.
@deancollins
I think you have your answer, but I would still be hesitant about VMware/Hyper-V performance. I wasn't aware that the D510 had hardware virtualization support. It seems weird that they would advertise virtualization capabilities on anything without Intel VT or AMD-V.
Very tempting, though I'm really liking my UnRAID box so far. $1500 got me 7TB of secure storage (expandable to 28TB in my current case, and if I upgraded to 2TB drives). Though UnRAID is still pretty immature, doesn't support a whole lot beyond Samba (just added NFS). Though it has the potential to really evolve since it's fairly open and based on commodity hardware / software.
@jfine That sounds like a pretty sweet setup, have any links or pointers to how you set it all up (hardware, software, config, etc)? (I'm being lazy, I know, I should jfgi, but figured I'd ask first). Thanks in advance!
@THJ It's pretty nifty. You can use pretty much any hardware you want. You can mix and match disks. The only important thing is that your parity disk must be the same size or larger than your largest disk in your array. Check out http://lime-technology.com/ tons of great info on the wiki and forums. What really sold me on it wasn't the mix and match disks, or true incremental expansion, but was the idea that if you loose multiple disks you don't loose all your data like you would in Raid5, I also really liked that the data disks can be directly accessed if you have to, unlike Raid5 where if you have a hardware failure like a controller going bad your stuck until you can get replacement parts.
nice 1 for macs !
Mmmm 16Tb
"known around these parts for its ever shrinking line of NAS devices"
Is the line shrinking or are the devices shrinking? I'm assuming you're referring to the devices based on the rest of the article but this wording confused me for a minute.