Atom gets into NAS servers

MAKER OF NAS SERVERS, QNAP has broken ARM's near monopoly in the Network Attached Storage (NAS) market and released boxes that run on Intel Atom chips.

QNAP's new series of ultra-high performance Turbo NAS servers are the TS-259 Pro, TS-459 Pro, TS-659 Pro and TS-859 Pro and are VMware's Vsphere4 virtualisation platform comparable. Rather than using ARM chips the boxes are based around Chipzilla's Atom D-510 dual-core processor.

A spokesman for the outfit claimed that the Atom delivers exceptional performance and maintains high reliability for multiple concurrent tasks and intensive data transfer with very low power consumption.

"The Intel Atom processor D510 provides a flexible architecture for QNAP to deliver a series of NAS systems that optimise performance and energy efficiency in this class of systems," the spokesman said.

The Turbo NAS series comes with version 3.2 of the QNAP NAS management software supporting iSCSI, SPC-3 Persistent Reservation for clustering, and MPIO and MC/S. There is also DFS support, import of user-list, customisable Daylight Saving Time and support for IPv6. µ