QNAP Newsroom

Taipei, Taiwan, November 9, 2026 – QNAP® Systems, Inc., a leading innovator in storage, networking, and data protection solutions, today launched the ES2486AFdc, a high-availability (HA) NVMe all-flash storage array engineered for mission-critical applications. The ES2486AFdc is QNAP's first enterprise-class storage combining Active-Active dual controllers with a U.2/U.3 NVMe all-flash architecture. Addressing the market challenges of high costs and limited availability caused by a shrinking number of SAS SSD suppliers, it breaks the performance bottlenecks of traditional HA systems limited by SAS interfaces. Utilizing a PCIe Gen4 architecture, it delivers exceptional low latency and high throughput. Powered by the ZFS-based QES operating system, it ensures zero data loss and serves as the perfect foundation for enterprise virtualization environments, VDI desktop deployments, and core databases, providing outstanding reliability to minimize downtime and prevent business interruptions.

With the high cost of enterprise-grade SAS SSDs today, the ES2486AFdc's active-active shared storage architecture enables dual controllers to share a single all-flash storage pool. This eliminates the heavy expense of building two separate storage systems, greatly maximizes hardware resource utilization, and significantly reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) for enterprises.

"The ES2486AFdc delivers outstanding performance and a reliable high-availability storage solution," said Sean Teng, Product Manager of QNAP, adding: "The ZFS-based QES operating system ensures zero data loss and maximizes storage efficiency through advanced data reduction technologies. From critical database transactions and VDI Boot Storms to 4K/8K media inline editing, the ES2486AFdc provides uncompromising stability and extreme performance to our customers."

Key Features

• High availability with Active-Active dual controllers: Two completely independent controllers process I/O requests simultaneously (Active-Active). In the event of a single controller failure, the other controller instantly takes over all NVMe SSDs and network IP via the high-speed PCIe non-transparent bridge (NTB) interconnection, ensuring seamless failover without interrupting front-end applications.

• Data protection and storage efficiency with ZFS-based QES: QES (QNAP Enterprise Storage) operating system ensures end-to-end data integrity. Inline data deduplication and inline compression significantly reduce file sizes and the amount of data written, maximizing the cost-effectiveness of flash storage while extending SSD lifespans.

• NVMe performance and low latency: Breaking the SAS bandwidth limits, every drive bay features a direct PCIe connection architecture. The NVMe protocol drastically reduces instruction queue waiting times, significantly boosting query and transaction speeds for latency-sensitive applications like SQL Server and Oracle Database.

• Advanced disaster recovery (DR): Built-in BBU (Battery Backup Unit) with Copy-to-Flash technology ensures that in the event of an unexpected power outage, cache data in the DRAM is safely written to the M.2 SSD protection area to prevent data loss. It supports up to 65,536 snapshots and SnapSync, which transfers only block-level changed data for real-time remote backup, perfectly integrating with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) for enterprise-class disaster recovery.

• Optimized for virtualization and diverse applications: Supports VMware® and Hyper-V® virtualization environments, with VAAI and ODX offload capabilities. iSER (iSCSI Extensions for RDMA) support reduces CPU loads and latency, effortlessly handling VDI Boot Storms where hundreds of employees boot up simultaneously.

• Petabyte-scale expansion: By installing optional QXP mini-SAS HD PCIe expansion cards for dual-path connections, up to seven QNAP expansion enclosures can be added, allowing the construction of petabyte-class logical storage capacity.

Key specifications

ES2486AFdc: Intel® Xeon® D 8-core processor (up to 3.0 GHz) and up to 512 GB DDR4 ECC memory per controller; 24 x dual-port U.2 / U.3 NVMe PCIe slots. Each controller features four built-in 10GbE SFP+ network ports and two PCIe expansion slots for 25GbE or Fibre Channel expansion cards; redundant power supplies.

The ES2486AFdc Enterprise NVMe All-Flash Storage is available now. For more information, and to view the full QNAP NAS lineup, please visit www.qnap.com