QNAP introduces high-availability enterprise array featuring dual active controllers and NVMe storage

QNAP has announced the ES2486AFdc, an enterprise 2U rackmount all-flash storage system equipped with two active controllers and 24 dual-port U.2/U.3 NVMe drive bays. The vendor rates the array at more than 616,000 iSCSI 4K random read IOPS and up to 15GB/s of throughput. The system is available immediately, though QNAP has not publicly disclosed pricing. [1][2]

Each controller runs an eight-core Intel Xeon D-2142IT processor and ships with 64GB of DDR4 ECC memory, expandable to 512GB per controller. Connectivity per controller includes four 10GbE SFP+ ports, three 2.5GbE ports, and two PCIe expansion slots, alongside a battery backup unit paired with a 64GB M.2 SSD to prevent data loss by flushing DRAM write cache during power outages. StorageReview notes a discrepancy in QNAP's materials regarding the expansion slots, with hardware specifications listing them as PCIe Gen3 x8 while the product page describes them as Gen4. [2]

Powered by QNAP's FreeBSD- and ZFS-based QES operating system, the system provides inline data deduplication, inline compression, and up to 65,535 snapshots per shared folder or LUN. QNAP is targeting the platform at database storage, AI pipelines, and virtualization environments such as VMware, Hyper-V, and Proxmox, designing the dual-controller setup to fail over without interrupting connected workloads. [1][2]