QNAP Introduces Dual CPU Plug-in Card for NAS Systems

QNAP announces the Mustang-200, a dual-processor accelerator card that plugs into the PCI-e slot of a NAS to give more computing power to network storage. QNAP comes with three configurations of the plug-in card.

For example, after installing a Mustang-200, users can put the subsystems with the card’s two processors through a virtual machine or container to work for image processing, such as from IP cameras, while the CPU of the host NAS itself handles its regular application, such as file processing.

Each of the two processors on the card has a 10Gbit/s network chip and independent IP addresses. The Mustang-200 can be connected to storage via iscsi or vjbod. Incidentally, both the storage and the network consume resources from the host NAS. The card runs on QNAP’s mQTS operating system and its subsystems are managed via Mustang Card Manager.

QNAP releases three models of the pci-e 2.0 x4 card: one with Core i7-7567U, two 512GB SSDs and 16GB RAM per CPU, one with Core i5-7267U with the same SSDs and RAM, and a cheaper version with Celeron, without SSDs and with only 4GB of RAM per CPU. The cards only work in combination with the QNAP TS-2477XU-RP, TS-1677XU-RP, TS-1685, TS-1677X, TVS-1282, TS-1277, TVS-882 and TS-877.