QNAP And AMD Partner To Deliver TS-563 Premium Business NAS

At CES this past January, QNAP surprised us by unveiling a NAS series powered by AMD processors. That sound strange to even say, but the reality is that AMD has largely been overlooked when it comes to NAS, even though it has compelling processors for the purpose. In a way, it was simply nice to see a vendor break the cycle of never-ending Atom-based units.

As we can now see, the TVS series wasn’t a one-off. This week, AMD and QNAP jointly announced that another model is coming, a “premium”one targeting business environments. Sporting a quad-core G-series APU clocked at 2.0GHz, likely to be the GX-420MC, and up to 16GB of RAM, the TS-563 means business. Literally.

Like the TVS model we talked about before, the TS-563 is flexible in that the RAM it ships with can be self-upgraded, and it also has a PCIe slot in case a customer wants to upgrade to 10GbE Ethernet. The basics include five bays, five USB 3.0 ports, and dual gigabit Ethernet ports.

Being a so-called premium model, the TS-563 boasts a number of high-end features. At the top is full-disk AES encryption, which at full-tilt can hit performance of 1,421MB/s thanks to the use of the AES-NI instruction set provided by the CPU. Transfer performance is also seriously impressive, peaking at 1,056MB/s when two 10GbE ports are teamed.

Also available is SSD cache acceleration, which would be an ideal feature to take advantage of if going 10GbE. The TS-563 also takes advantage of AMD’s AMD-V virtualization acceleration, allowing multiple virtual machines to be run right on the device, with VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft solutions supported.

For those needing a lot of storage, the TS-563 can be paired up with two expansion enclosures, ultimately supporting up to 168TB of total capacity.

As the TS-563 isn’t expected to hit retail for a few weeks, pricing information is being kept mum for now, but when the time comes, the NAS will be available in either a 2GB or 8GB flavor. If you want 16GB, you’ll need to upgrade after-the-fact.