QNAP Systems, Inc. (QNAP) today released the QTS 5.1.0 beta NAS operating system that delivers highly efficient and cost-effective storage solutions for business IT with abundant features, including SMB multichannel, delegated administration, accelerated SMB signing, automatic RAID disk replacement, Hailo-8 AI module support, and multi-device management through a cloud management platform. QNAP provides numerous NAS models with 2.5GbE and 10GbE as standard, providing suitability for SMB multichannel to drive boosted network performance and maximize IT investment.

"QNAP continues enhancing core functions of storage and strengthening NAS security," said Tim Lin, Product Manager of QNAP, adding "We help our users stay fast, flexible, and agile by offering competitive storage solutions, ensuring they can acquire cutting-edge applications and operational efficiency to lower IT and management costs."Key new features in QTS 5.1.0:

• SMB multichannel for full throughput and multi-path protection: SMB multichannel aggregates multiple network connections to maximize available bandwidth with higher transfer speeds - especially ideal for large file and multimedia transfer. SMB multichannel also allows network fault tolerance to prevent service interruption.
• Supports AES-128-GMAC for SMB signing acceleration: QTS 5.1.0 supports AES-128-GMAC signing acceleration (only in Windows Server 2022 and Windows 11 clients) that not only greatly increases data signing efficiency over SMB 3.1.1 but also enhances the CPU utilization of the NAS system - providing the best balance of security and performance.
• QNAP Authenticator enhances NAS login security: The QNAP Authenticator mobile app is available for setting up two-step log-in process to NAS accounts, including time-based one-time passwords, QR code scanning, and login approval. Passwordless login is also supported.
• Delegated administration improves management productivity and data security: NAS administrators can delegate 8 types of roles to other users with specified permissions to management tasks and NAS data. For growing organizations, role delegation helps ease management workloads without sacrificing data access controls.
• Automatic RAID disk replacement with spares before potential failure: If potential drive errors are noticed, the system automatically moves data from the affected disk in a RAID group to a spare disk, before the data on the affected disk is completely corrupted. It prevents the time and risk from RAID rebuild, thus system reliability is greatly improved. QTS 5.1.0 integrates more HDD/SSD health check tools, including S.M.A.R.T., Western Digital Device Analytics, IronWolf Health Management, and ULINK DA Drive Analyzer.
• Improved drive health analysis and failure prediction: ULINK DA Drive Analyzer leverages cloud-based AI to predict drive failure. Now it comes with an advanced user interface that allows users to clearly identify drive information in each drive bay/slot, life prediction score, and drive data upload log. The DA Desktop Suite, available for Windows and macOS, helps you monitor several devices for multiple users.
• Monitor and manage multiple NAS using AMIZ Cloud orchestrator management platform: AMIZ Cloud, a centralized cloud management platform, can remotely monitor not only QuCPE Network Virtualization Premise Equipment but also QNAP NAS. It enables remote monitoring NAS resources and system status, conducting firmware updates, and batch install/update/start/stop apps. For organizations with multiple sites or branches, IT staff can easily manage multi-site devices from a single place.
• Add a Hailo-8 M.2 AI module to boost smart surveillance with much lower total costs: By adding a Hailo-8 M.2 AI acceleration module to a QNAP surveillance server, QNAP AI Core is empowered with boosted AI recognition performance, increasing the number of IP cameras for simultaneous analysis for QVR Face facial recognition and QVR Human people counting. This helps maximize your investment compared to using the same quantity of expensive AI cameras.

QTS 5.1.0 beta is available from the Download Center.