QNAP Ships TVS-871T NAS With Thunderbolt DAS Functionality

The QNAP TVS-871T is already a Tom's Hardware award winner and is now shipping in the channel. First introduced at Computex 2015 last June, the TVS-871T marries traditional NAS functionality with high speed direct attached storage (DAS) features through Thunderbolt 2 technology.

We awarded the TVS-871T at Computex for its impressive feature list and innovative design. This is not only QNAP's first Thunderbolt 2 system, but it's also the industry's first DAS/NAS/iSCSI SAN combination product that will decrease workflow latency for audio and video professionals. QNAP also incorporated dual 10-gigabit Ethernet into the system for high speed transfers to network attached users. Thunderbolt 2 technology powers the direct attached function with up to 20 gigabits of bandwidth that can be shared among five devices chained together.

The system can also expand for a larger storage pool by attaching either the TX-800P or TX-500P expansion enclosures. Using the TX-800P products, the TVS-871T is able to scale to 448 TB of raw storage.

QNAP's latest release has two part numbers. The first uses Intel's flagship Core i7-4790S quad-core processor running at 3.2 GHz. The second product SKU uses a quad-core i5-4590S at 3.0 GHz. Both systems ship with 16 GB of system DRAM and support AES-NI hardware encryption. The embedded QTS 4.2 operating system is housed on a 512 MB DOM that retains system configuration data even with the hard disk drives are removed.

“We at Intel are extremely pleased that QNAP has chosen to embed Thunderbolt 2 into their TVS-871T DAS/NAS/iSCSI/IP-SAN storage solution," said Jason Ziller, Intel's Thunderbolt Director of Marketing. “Thunderbolt is clearly cemented as the key connection technology for simultaneously supporting high-speed data transfers and high definition video displays. The new QNAP product is a testament to this vision."

Industry professionals are excited to see a dual purpose system that allows more users to share and manipulate data at high speeds. Until now, it was difficult to purchase an off-the-shelf product that delivered the same capabilities as the TVS-871T. QNAP's software sets this system in another league compared to offerings from other NAS manufacturers.

The TVS-871T is also the first model from QNAP to ship with the new innovative QTS 4.2 operating system that features more applications and third-party functions than ever before.

The system is also able to utilize solid state drives to accelerate random data read performance. The SSD cache function was introduced by QNAP in other products over a year ago, and it works remarkably well to deliver datacenter-like performance for small random file transfers to the host system.

Both the Core i5- and i7-powered system are available today. The i5 system sells for $2,799, and the i7 for $3,199 -- these are both prices from B&H.