QNAP has introduced the ES2486AFdc, a 2U all-flash storage system with two active-active controllers and 24 dual-port U.2/U.3 NVMe drive bays. The new model expands the company’s Enterprise ZFS NAS line, replacing the SAS drive bays used in the earlier ES2486dc with PCIe Gen4 NVMe connectivity. QNAP says the system is available now; the company has not announced pricing.
QNAP rates the array at more than 616,000 4K random-read IOPS over iSCSI and throughput of up to 15GB/s. Those are manufacturer figures, and QNAP has not published the test configuration behind them. The company positions the system for environments including virtualization, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), databases and AI data pipelines, where high performance and controller redundancy are important.
Dual controllers and failover
Both controllers can serve I/O in the active-active configuration. Each uses an eight-core Intel Xeon D-2142IT processor, with a 1.9GHz base frequency and turbo speeds up to 3.0GHz. The system ships with 64GB of DDR4 ECC RDIMM memory per controller and supports up to 512GB per controller, or 1TB across the pair.
Each controller includes four 10GbE SFP+ ports, three 2.5GbE ports—one of which can be assigned to management—and two PCIe expansion slots for networking or Fibre Channel cards. QNAP says that if one controller fails, the other takes over access to the NVMe drives and network IP addresses through a PCIe non-transparent bridge. The company says front-end applications can continue without interruption or requiring a reconnect.
Write-cache protection combines DRAM, a battery backup unit and a 64GB M.2 SSD in each controller. QNAP says that during a power loss, the battery keeps the controller running long enough to flush cached writes to the M.2 device. This is part of the company’s basis for its zero-data-loss claim; it is not an independently documented test result in the specifications provided.
NVMe drive capacity and expansion
Each of the 24 hot-swappable 2.5-inch bays provides a PCIe Gen4 x4 lane and supports U.3 drives, with backward compatibility for U.2. Moving from the prior model’s SAS bays removes the 12Gb/s SAS interface limit, according to QNAP. The system also supports SAS expansion enclosures: up to seven can be connected using dual-path links. QNAP cites that expansion capability when describing the platform’s potential to scale to petabyte-level capacity.
There is a specification discrepancy to resolve for customers planning add-in cards. The hardware specification lists the two expansion slots on each controller as PCIe Gen3 x8, while the product page describes them as Gen4. The listed Xeon D-2100-series processor is also a Gen3 platform. Buyers should confirm the supported slot generation with QNAP when selecting cards.
QES features and supported workloads
The ES2486AFdc runs QES, QNAP’s FreeBSD- and ZFS-based operating system for its dual-controller systems. QNAP lists end-to-end checksums for detecting and repairing silent data corruption, as well as up to 65,535 copy-on-write snapshots per LUN or shared folder. Inline deduplication and compression are also included. The company says deduplication can save more than 90% of space on identical VDI images; actual results depend on the data being stored.
QES also includes a write-coalescing algorithm that batches random writes into sequential operations, which QNAP says can reduce write amplification on NVMe drives. SnapSync replicates changed blocks to a remote system in real time and integrates with VMware Site Recovery Manager for disaster recovery.
QNAP lists support for VMware, Hyper-V and Proxmox, along with VAAI and ODX offload. The system supports iSER for iSCSI over RDMA and Storage QoS, which QNAP describes as a way to provide predictable performance from a shared pool. The company identifies VDI boot storms, database workloads and collaborative 4K and 8K editing over 25GbE as target use cases. It also positions the ES2486AFdc as a performance-focused companion to the ES1686AFdc, which is oriented toward capacity.
The system is supplied in a 2U rackmount chassis with redundant, hot-swappable power supplies and a five-year standard warranty, according to the specifications. Its combination of NVMe bays, ZFS features and dual-controller operation is aimed at organizations consolidating demanding workloads, though QNAP’s headline performance figures should be assessed in light of the undisclosed test configuration.
