Questions and Answers with QNAP regarding Intel Baytrail and its latest NAS devices

Q: What has been QNAP's strategy this year?
A: For the SMB/SOHO NAS / personal cloud audience, QNAP's focus is to deliver the Celeron CPU / Intel Baytrail platform. Intel's platform is very attractive because of performance and media transcoding capability.
Both Evansport and Avoton were promoted by Intel as a storage platform, both platforms were adopted by our competition. However, we think both weren't the best choice for us. Evansport's claimed media transcoding is not complete, and Avonton is good, but wrongly positioned compared with Core i3 and Celeron because of its lack of HDMI media interface. Also, performance was stuck in the middle, which cannot satisfy corporate users, or performance demanding user's needs. So, we skipped these two solutions, and strived to create a really powerful, low-power, and affordable all-in-one storage appliance.

We chose to go with Intel Baytrail. It is powerful (with dual and quad-core choices), extremely low power in operation, and with great acceleration feature to enabled our killer apps. Above you can see a chart which compares our Intel Baytrail NAS solutions to our competition.
Q: What are trends you feel that users want for the SMB / home NAS audience?
A: Traditional NAS' can be managed and accessed by web browser.

QNAP makes a user-friendly management, we call it QTS OS - the latest version being 4.1. We not only deliver an easy to use user experience, we also enable more possibilities - for example, each of the SMB NAS in our line up with an HDMI port. In the beginning, users and our competition may have just thought they could just use another player to stream the media from NAS.
However, QNAP not only created new features based on HDMI and the "HD Station", but on the other hand, we made it a platform! We enabled many more possibilities and made a revolutionary personal cloud.
- ex. For home, the QNAP NAS can be the XBMC player - connect to your HDTV
- ex. for Small office, QNAP can host and run Virtual Machine (Windows OS), and NAS can be used like a PC, with all the storage service up and running. We recently also released Spotify support over HD Station, which transforms the NAS as a music server and player as well
Most of the competition felt surprised at the launch of our TS-x53 Pro and TS-x51 series. So we won't be surprised if other companies follow QNAP's decision. However, to fully utilize all the power of this platform and match 100% of what QNAP is currently doing now (Virtualization Station, QvPC, and also the XBMC / 7.1 surrounding sound support, and all the QTS 4 app-oriented features), it will take much longer time for them to catch up.

We have been working for a while to deliver the following: a pleasant, user-friendly experience and a true all-in-one storage appliance with the features offered in an easy way. This also lets our users not just use it to enhance productivity, but to also enjoy it with the peace of mind of data protection.
VM applications are not only ideal for small business, but we also are starting to have lots of interest from industry to deploy in different application environment. We also started to integrate with home automation systems such as Control 4 and Crestron, as well partner with lots of resellers in the ecosystem. Don't be surprised if you begin to see QNAP more and more as a top choice for home theater enthusiasts.
Q: Can you show us some pictures of your latest NAS products?
A: Sure, here they are below!
TS-251

TS-253 Pro

TS-451

TS-453 Pro

TS-651

TS-653 Pro

TS-851

TS-853 Pro

We'd like to take the time to thank QNAP for answering these questions. If you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions for QNAP, they'll be here reading, so you can leave your comments in the comments section below.