As part of my usual CES vendor visits, I caught up with QNAP and took a look at the new products and QTS features slated to enter the market over the next couple of quarters. The products that caught my eye included a new series of Thunderbolt-enabled NAS units, a couple of products targeting the IoT / residential wireless gateway space, a NAS unit with an optical drive slot, and a 16-bay Xeon D NAS in the tower form factor. On the software side, QNAP also demonstrated a new QVR Pro Surveillance Station integrating the Surveillance Station package into the QTS OS along with a host of improvements. The DJ2 Live live-stream broadcast platform was also in action at the booth. I won’t go much into the software announcements — Interested readers can refer to the press release , and there really is not much to add beyond that on those aspects.
We last looked at QNAP’s offerings in our coverage of their TVS-x82T launch back in May 2016. One of the questions I had asked at the launch event was about the non-availability of Thunderbolt 3 (the TVS-x82T series came with Thunderbolt 2 ports). At CES 2017, QNAP introduced the first set of NAS units with Thunderbolt 3 support — with the TVS-1282T3 being the flagship in that segment. Sporting 8x 3.5″ bays and 4x 2.5″ bays along with 2x M.2 SATA SSD slots, the unit can be configured with either a Core i5-7500 or Core i7-7700 CPU. Available I/Os include 2x Thunderbolt 2 as well as 2x Thunderbolt 3 ports, 2x 10GBASE-T and 4x GbE network links, five USB 3.0 ports (one in front, four in the back), two microphone inputs, and two speaker outputs as well as a 3.5mm audio line-out. There are four SODIMM slots, allowing end-users to configure the system with up to 64GB of RAM.
QNAP also introduced the 2.5″-only TVS-882ST models — The TVS-882ST2 has Thunderbolt 2 ports, while the TVS-882ST3 has Thunderbolt 3 ports. Unlike the flagship TVS-1282T3, these units use the high-end Skylake mobile CPUs (Core i7-6700HQ or Core i5-6442EQ). The brochure for the TVS-882ST series also brings out the two Thunderbolt usage scenarios — as a direct-attached storage unit (with the expansion units allowing as much as 400TB to be accessed directly), or a 10Gb switch (with the virtual switch feature that can act as a Thunderbolt to Ethernet converter) to create a 10Gbps interface for the system connecting to it.
