Qnap Launches Dual-Port 100GbE Expansion Card for NAS

Qnap has introduced a dual-port 100GbE network adapter that is aimed primarily at the company's flagship 24-bay NVMe all-flash storage solution that has a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot, but it is also compatible with other NAS systems as well as Linux and Windows-based PCs. 

The Qnap QXG-100G2SF-E810 dual-port 100GbE adapter is based on the Intel Ethernet Controller E810 and is equipped with two QSFP28 connectors. The card has a PCIe 4.0 x16 interface offering a bandwidth of 31.5 GB/s and is designed for Qnap's top-of-the-range 24-bay TS-h2490FU all-flash storage system that is based on AMD's Epyc 7302P processor and can pack up to 24 U.2 SSDs.  

The all-flash storage system equipped with a dual-port 100GbE network adaptor can be connected to a switch and use one 100GbE connection as the main connection and another as backup. Qnap says that it also plans to launch a quad-port 25GbE switch that can be connected to one 100GbE port (or both 100GbE ports) on the QXG-100G2SF-E810 and enable eight 25GbE ports to connect the NAS to multiple servers in a datacenter. 

The card fully supports all advanced networking capabilities, such as Forward Error Correction (FEC), including Base-R FEC featuring Firecode encoding as well as RS-FEC featuring Reed Solomon encoding. It will also support iWARP/RDMA and SR-IOV features for I/O-intensive and latency-sensitive virtualization workloads. 

"The QXG-100G2SF-E810 redefines ultra-high-speed networking with 100Gbps connectivity," said Stanley Huang, Product Manager of QNAP, adding "Users can also configure network redundancy to achieve network failover via the switch for continuous service and high availability." 

Qnap's QXG-100G2SF-E810 network card will be available directly from the company and its resellers shortly. Pricing is unknown.