The manufacturer QNAP held its QNAP WORLD TOUR 2024 yesterday at TheCUBE, where they summarized all the new features incorporated in this year of 2024, and where they also anticipated what is to come in terms of private cloud storage, hybrid cloud and also in the manufacturer’s own new public cloud. If you are interested in NAS, connectivity and the cloud, below we explain the highlights of yesterday’s event.
At this manufacturer’s event, they wanted to highlight both the private cloud and the manufacturer’s public cloud, and the best combination for good data integrity management is the hybrid cloud solution, with the aim that have everything redundant.
Hybrid cloud and the future of QNAP
The manufacturer QNAP allows us to have up to 4PB (Petabytes) of storage right now, using a TS-h2490FU NAS server along with different expansion servers such as the TL-R2400PES-RP, high-performance models, but, above all, a large storage capacity. The most notable thing about this manufacturer and its operating system is that we have in Hybrid Backup Sync 3 a complete solution for making advanced backups. In addition, we have the possibility of mounting the storage of any cloud through HybridMount. Right now the manufacturer supports myQNAPcloud Storage clouds from the manufacturer itself, but also the Qloudea cloud, OneDrive, Azure, Dropbox and many more.
QNAP makes it very easy to access the server resources, and a local user can access locally via LAN or Thunderbolt (if the NAS supports it), but we can also use Cloud Link for remote clients, QVPN to connect securely to the NAS via VPN using WireGuard and OpenVPN, as well as using QuWAN if we want to communicate different headquarters of the same company, all in a fairly simple way.
QuTS hero will be the operating system for SMEs and companies
With the QuTS hero operating system we have at our disposal the OpenZFS file system, the most advanced on the market right now. With this file system we will have very advanced options at our disposal, such as Snapshots, deduplication, and we even have SnapSync to synchronize the snapshots themselves between several NAS, and thus have a really fast disaster recovery.
ZFS combined with HBS3 will allow us to create immutable backups, making it perfect for adding another layer of security. In addition, QNAP now recommends making 3-2-1-1-0 backups, basically recommending us to use Airgap+ which allows you to “isolate” the destination NAS from backups, to protect it against possible ransomware attacks. The operation of this technology is simple, if we use their Qhora routers, we can isolate the destination NAS server and it will only be available when HBS3 is running a backup, with the aim that we can make offline backups but in an automated way.
Only during the duration of the backup will we have access to said NAS server, in order to protect it against possible attacks.
News in switching
Another novelty in terms of switching is MC-LAG, the protocol that allows us high availability, both between the switches and also for the equipment that we connect via cable. This way, if one of the links fails, everything will continue to work transparently. Right now QNAP already has 100Gbps cards, specifically the QXG-100G2SF-E810 model, a model that has two 100G ports with a PCIe 4.0 x16 interface.
The manufacturer’s high-end manageable switch models have QSS Pro, the new operating system that has more functions such as MC-LAG and also L3 lite, such as static routes and even the possibility of intercommunicating VLANs directly on the switch.
The cloud to rule them all
The manufacturer has launched Hybrid Backup Center, a cloud service from the QNAP manufacturer that allows us to centrally manage all backup copies of different servers. This feature allows you to save a lot of time when managing backups, both locally on another NAS, as well as directly to the public cloud with any service. The Hybrid Backup Center is still a generalization of HBS3, in this way, we can configure a large number of backup policies.
We must also remember that we have AMIZ Cloud, for centralized management of all the servers we want. From this cloud platform, we will be able to have full control of all the manufacturer’s equipment, we will be able to restart them, turn them off, update their operating system and even directly access their administration, all in a centralized manner. If a company has 10 NAS servers (for example), it can manage them centrally from here.
