Many will know QNAP from the NAS units that it makes. A great example of this is the QNAP TS-873A AMD Ryzen 8-bay NAS we reviewed. Sometimes, those NAS units come in rackmount enclosures like the QNAP GM-1002 3U dual ZFS NAS. What many do not know is that QNAP makes a variety of boxes. Perhaps the craziest of these is the new QNAP QuCPE-7012. CPE here refers to customer premises equipment. Let us get into the QuCPE-7012.
QNAP Goes Crazy with 2.5G and 10G QuCPE-7012
Before we get too far, this is not a new segment for QNAP. We actually covered the QuCPE line at VMworld 2019 this is what the boxes looked like two years ago. One can see that there were only six ports and no fiber ports on the front of the chassis.
Here is the new system. We can see eight RJ45 network ports on the front. These are not just 1GbE ports. Instead, QNAP says these are 2.5GbE ports. There are also four SFP+ ports for 10GbE. The left-most panel here can also be expanded with additional 10GbE ports.
Looking quickly at the rear, we can see redundant power supplies. We can also see a PCIe Gen3 x8 slot where a 10GbE/ 25GbE card can be installed.
Inside the system, we get Intel Xeon D-2100 series processors. The configurations are the Xeon D-2166NT (12C/24T) with 64GB of RAM, Xeon D-2146NT (8C/16T) with 32GB of RAM, and the Xeon D-2123IT with 8GB of RAM.
QNAP has a suite of SD-WAN solutions and for management including its AMIZ Cloud, QNE Network OS, and QuWAN that help make this work. The company also says it is leveraging DPDK and QAT to increase the performance of these boxes.
Final Words
I checked with Patrick, and unfortunately, we have asked and not been able to review the QuCPE line previously. We do a lot of motherboard and system reviews that fit into this space, and also higher-end and lower-end segments, but it is great to see QNAP coming out with a more advanced platform. Using the Xeon D-2100 series with 2.5GbE networking and several SFP+ ports certainly is a big differentiator in the market. It looks like a very cool solution, assuming it all works.
@Rohit, it has been years since I dealt with this stuff, so correct me if I am wrong.
For those not in the know, “customer premises equipment” is the name given to the gateway/router/thing that stands between one’s LAN and a routed Internet connection sold by a telco or Internet data networking company. It should be capable of handling whatever esoteric network protocol the telco uses, and usually it can do BGP or similar.