Intel's 1.8GHz Atom gets shoved into a NAS box

STORAGE VENDOR Qnap has updated its business oriented network attached storage (NAS) boxes by sticking a newer Intel chip inside.

The firm has managed to stuff a single core Intel Atom D425 1.8GHz chip into its 2 and 4-bay TS-x39 Pro II+ NAS boxes. Coupled with a healthy 1GB of RAM, the firm says that the units offer "superior performance and high reliability". As part of Qnap's pitch towards businesses, it says the NAS boxes support VMWare, Citrix and Windows 2008 Hyper-V virtualisation.

There is support for 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch hard drives with capacities of up to 2TB, and the drive trays are lockable, not that lifting one of the whole boxes is particularly laborious. Aside from the customary RAID levels, there's also iSCSI support and a typically feature-rich mix of web server, file archiving and backup software.

As is the vogue, Qnap offers an 'app store' allowing customers the chance to load open source add-ons to the TSx39. A wide range of software is available including database management software and even customer relationship management software.

Although Intel's Atom chip fails to provide the same levels of energy efficiency as the ARM design Marvell chip that the firm used in models it revealed earlier this week, for some the perceived comfort of having an Intel chip will be a big selling point.

With all of the software that's bundled into the TS-x39 Pro II+, calling it a simple NAS box is a big disservice. Early NAS boxes had hardware that would barely be able to saturate their gigabit Ethernet interface, let alone be able to handle services such as Apache or MySQL, however in recent times NAS boxes have morphed into fully fledged servers.

Qnap and others are now targeting small businesses that might not have the in-house expertise or funds to purchase a server and have it configured by an outside firm. Laurent Cheng, product manager at Qnap was clear about what the TS-x39 is made to do, saying that the unit "continues to perform [in] an important niche as a mid-range NAS server at price points which are attractive to small business users," adding that the Intel 1.8GHz Atom chip is "even faster and [has] better performance while executing concurrent applications and intensive data transfer".

While traditional servers offer both processor and memory upgrade paths, fully featured NAS servers can be a tempting choice for small firms. There is always the possibility of ditching the bundled software and loading a full-on Linux distribution, however for many the software that Qnap provides will be more than enough, both in terms of functionality and simplicity.

Qnap says that its TS-x39 Pro II+ units are available right now. µ