QNAP had a number of interesting announcements at Computex, and one that grabbed my attention right away was the new TS-x70 Pro series. Available in 4-bay, 6-bay and 8-bay models, this series marks the arrival of the new QTS 4.0 OS on x86. Instead of going for an Intel Atom-based platform, QNAP has decided to base this NAS series on a Ivy Bridge Core i3-3220. The i3-3220 doesn't have AES-NI and hence, no hardware acceleration for encrypted volumes. However, QNAP claims that the performance of the CPU is good enough to not have a very negative impact on encrypted volume performance (when compared to the Atom-based NAS units).

Other interesting features include integrated QSync (Dropbox-like feature), XBMC v12 (Frodo) in the HD Station and support for 4K media playback over HDMI (to a 1080p HDMI sink). On the business side, the NAS units also support optional 10 GbE card (there is a PCIe expansion slot).

We have already covered QTS 4.0 before. At Computex, QNAP showed it in action, with particular emphasis on the app-centric design and multi-window user interface. QNAP also introduced the REXP-1200U-RP and REXP-1600U-RP expanders which allow the TS-x79U series to scale up to 400 TB. The availability of VMware VAAI, vSphere client plug-in, Microsoft SCVMM/ODX and other features necessary for a virtualization-aware solution were touted. The VioStor NVR firmware is also getting a revamp with a new UI, cross-browser support and a 64-channel live monitoring display mode / 16-channel playback display mode.

Availability and pricing of the announced products wasn't available at the time of posting. We have reached out to QNAP and will update this piece after their response.

Source: QNAP

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  • cjb110 - Friday, June 7, 2013 - link

    urm what's the point of 4k support, when HDMI can't do it...other than that nice idea.
  • DanNeely - Friday, June 7, 2013 - link

    Follyweird movie content is typically 24/30 fps not 60; HDMI 1.4 has enough bandwidth to do that. However, I think what the article is saying is that it can do realtime transcoding from 4k to 1080p so you only need to store the top quality copy but can watch it on non-4k devices without trouble.
  • Zok - Friday, June 7, 2013 - link

    HDMI 1.4 supports 4K. Been on the Radeon 7XXX and GeForce 6XX/7XX for some time now.
  • ganeshts - Friday, June 7, 2013 - link

    Intel Ivy Bridge could do 4K decode but not 4K output.. This has been well known for quite some time. Basically, QNAP has made sure that the decoder works in the XBMC build for its custom OS.

    No transcoding necessary.. It is 4K decode, and downscale to 1080p.. what a typical Ivy Bridge PC can do.

    Readeon 7xxx (at least 7750 and greater) and GeForce 640 and greater support 4K over HDMI.
  • colinstu - Friday, June 7, 2013 - link

    What's stopping someone from swapping that CPU out with one that DOES feature AES-NI? ;)
  • DanNeely - Friday, June 7, 2013 - link

    The warranty. Honestly though since these aren't entry level nases I'm not sure why they don't just spend the extra $50 for an i5 with AES-NI support.
  • Kevin G - Friday, June 7, 2013 - link

    It could be soldered on to the motherboard and thus be non-replaceable.
  • DanNeely - Friday, June 7, 2013 - link

    The 3220 is an LGA 1155 desktop processor; only (some of) Intel's mobile/mobile derived chips are available in BGA packages suitable for soldering to the mobo.
  • Veroxious - Friday, June 7, 2013 - link

    So why not just offer a model with a CPU that does support AES-NI?

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