Specifications, Availability and Pricing

QNAP has two new units that are nearly identical, the TS-1279U-RP and the TS-EC1279U-RP, the latter we are looking at today. The difference between the two is the Error Correction and Control (ECC) DRAM. Out TS-EC1279U-RP shipped to us with 4GB of ECC DRAM, an Intel Xeon E3-1225 3.1GHZ quad-core processor and four gigabit Ethernet ports.

The TS-EC-1279U-RP on release was the flagship for QNAP's enterprise line up with 12-bays, but QNAP has since released a new 16-bay model. The new 12 and 16 bay units take QNAP to the upper SMB and even middle of the enterprise market. This is a new direction and puts QNAP in the same realm with many of the storage servers offered by Dell and other more established server manufacturers.

QNAP is making a big push in the medium sized business market and is really taking it to the competition. New features like 10GbE network capability are letting QNAP leverage their excellent software package at very high speeds.

The TS-EC-1279U-RP is a full on enterprise NAS, it doesn't even fit in the racks I use here in my office. It does fit in the full 42U enterprise rack in my garage so you will want to make sure your rack uses square holes with plugs and isn't the screw type.

At the time of writing we managed to find the QNAP TS-EC1279U-RP at Newegg for $3,500. Newegg was quite a bit lower than many of the sources we found on Google.