Taiwan's QNAP Systems has today announced a duo of NAS units that it's describing as the world’s first one-bay and two-bay solutions to provide iSCSI functionality for home, SOHO, and SMB users.
Dubbed the TS-119 Turbo NAS (pictured below, right) and TS-219 Turbo NAS (pictured below, left), the streamlined units feature a "fashionable shiny black design", says QNAP, and are powered a 1.2GHz Marvell processor and 512MB of DDR2 memory.
By slimming down on capacity when compared to say the mammoth eight-bay TS-809, QNAP hopes to appeal to budget-conscious users looking for an affordable intro to network attached storage (NAS).
Despite offering only one or two bays, both the TS-119 and TS-219 provide plenty of useful NAS functionality including support for iSCSI, online RAID expansion, online RAID level migration on the TS-219, network surveillance, media server, mail server and download server.
Further enhancing their home-user-friendly credentials is support for QNAP's 3.0 beta firmware - providing an AJAX-based web interface that should make NAS configuration more intuitive to newcomers.
Commenting on the products, QNAP product manager Laurent Cheng had this to say:
The new generation TS-119 and TS-219 Turbo NAS are the most affordable NAS servers with iSCSI application for personal and business users. The built-in iSCSI target feature allows the users to create an IP-SAN (storage area network) for data backup or storage capacity expansion on the home or office network. The Turbo NAS is also ideal multimedia storage solution for home users. The built-in UPnP/ DLNA media server (TwonkyMedia) of the TS-119 and TS-219 supports numerous DLNA media players such as Sony PS3, Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming consoles and High-Definition media players (compatible with NFS). The users can even use their iPhone and iPod touch to play the music and video or view the photos on the NAS."
On paper, both the TS-119 and TS-219 look to be useful solutions for those looking to get started with NAS products and they're available to order from the QNAPstore priced at £217.95 and £271.95, respectively.
Official press release: QNAP Launches the World's First 1-bay and 2-bay NAS with iSCSI
