Qnap TS-h2477AXU-RP review: A big NAS appliance to satisfy storage-hungry businesses

Qnap continues to make inroads into the enterprise storage market as the TS-h2477AXU-RP NAS appliance offers a powerful rack-mount package with an impressively large capacity. Stepping up as the new flagship model in Qnap's TS-hx77AXU-RP rackmount family, it also has a keen focus on value and is a lower-cost alternative to Qnap's 30-bay TS-h3087XU-RP hybrid appliance.

Powered by a speedy 3.5GHz 8-core AMD Ryzen 7 7700 CPU and up to 192GB of DDR5 memory, the 4U chassis sports 24 hot-plug LFF/SFF drive bays along with dual internal M.2 PCIe Gen5 slots for NVMe SSDs. True, you don't get the extra rear SFF bays offered by the TS-hx87XU-RP range, but the TS-h2477AXU-RP has big expansion plans as it can handle eight of Qnap's 24-bay 4U TL-R2400PES-RP JBOD shelves for a total of 216 drives and up to 5PB of raw storage.

Networking options are plentiful as the appliance presents dual embedded 2.5GbE and 10GbE RJ45 ports, which are all the multi-Gigabit variety. Three spare PCIe Gen4 expansion slots mean there's plenty of room for more, and Qnap offers a wide choice of its own certified 2.5GbE, 10GbE, and 25GbE network adapters.

Qnap TS-h2477AXU-RP review: Design and deployment

The appliance is clothed in a sturdy steel chassis with solid metal drive carriers, and the price includes dual 800W hot-plug PSUs. Popping the lid reveals the motherboard lurking in the base, and closer inspection shows it is the same as that used by Qnap's TS-h3077AFU all-Flash array, but with the two rear SSD cages removed and the dual M.2 NVMe SSD slots added.

The Ryzen CPU is mounted by a large passive heatsink, and cooling is handled by a bank of four cold-swap fans mounted behind the drive backplane. Four long DIMM slots sit to the right, with one occupied by the base 32GB of memory, leaving room to upgrade to 128GB without having to replace it.

The 'h' in the model name clearly shows the preferred operating system is Qnap's QuTS Hero – you can load the nimbler QTS software during the installation phase, but you'll be missing out on a wealth of data protection and storage reduction features. QuTS hero offers end-to-end checksums for transparent data corruption recovery, triple parity RAID and triple mirroring, WORM (write once read many) policies to protect NAS shares from tampering, and inline data deduplication, which requires a minimum of 16GB to function.

Qnap doesn't enforce the same drive restriction policies as Synology, and we had no problems using two Kingston 480GB NVMe SSDs for system pool duties and four 22TB Western Digital Red Pro NAS HDDs for general data storage. The web-based deployment wizard installs QuTS hero, and we then use the Storage & Snapshots app to create a mirrored array for the system pool and a big RAID5 array for our data.

Qnap TS-h2477AXU-RP review: Data protection

QuTS hero offers ZFS copy-on-write for fast, almost unlimited snapshots of NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs, which can be scheduled to run as often as every minute for near-continuous protection. NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs can be encrypted, and the SnapSync app provides fast replication to remote appliances using scheduled and real-time block-level snapshots.

When creating NAS shares, you can opt to apply one of two WORM policies to protect them from ransomware attacks, and once assigned, they cannot be modified or disabled. The Enterprise policy allows a protected folder to be deleted, but stops anything in it from being individually modified or removed, while the stronger Compliance policy blocks folder deletion and only allows it to be removed by deleting the entire storage pool.

There are plenty of free backup apps available with the Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) 3, managing 3-2-1 protection strategies and securing local appliance data to remote NAS appliances or cloud providers, including Qnap's myQNAPcloud service. The Hyper Data Protector (HDP) app secures VMware and Hyper-V virtualized environments, presents a dedicated management web console, and can run block-level backups of Windows PCs and servers that have Qnap's free NetBak PC agent installed.

During testing, we updated the appliance with the latest QuTS hero 5.3, which introduces plenty of new features, including a high availability manager that allows two identical appliances to be placed in a fault-tolerant active/passive cluster. The Control Panel, iSCSI & Fibre Channel, and Storage Manager apps see completely redesigned interfaces, while snapshot management has been moved to a dedicated app, which offers protection policies for creating immutable snapshots.

Qnap TS-h2477AXU-RP review: 10GbE performance

For performance testing, we used the appliance's embedded 10GbE ports and hooked it up to the lab's Dell PowerEdge R760xs Xeon Scalable Windows Server 2022 host. With a NAS share mapped to the server, we recorded Iometer sequential read and write rates both of 9.2Gbits/sec, and swapping to random operations returned 9.2Gbits/sec and 9.1Gbits/sec.

IP SAN speeds are equally good, with a 1TB target delivering the same sequential and random rates as our NAS share. We increased the pressure with a dual 10GbE MPIO link to the target and watched sequential read and write speeds increase to 18.5Gbits/sec and 17.4Gbits/sec.

Swapping to random read and write operations delivered 18.3Gbit/sec and 16.5Gbits/sec, and we noted for the latter test, the Ryzen CPU never went beyond 17% utilization. These numbers also highlight the efficiency of the QuTS hero ZFS ARC (adaptive read cache) and ZIL (ZFS intent log) as they negate the need for SSD caches to improve random operations.

Qnap TS-h2477AXU-RP review: Is it worth it?

Yes, it is, with Broadbandbuyer confirming to us an end-user price for a diskless model of £6,635 excluding VAT. Qnap's 16-bay TS-h1677AXU-RP model comes in £5,378, so the TS-h2477AXU-RP offers a lower cost per drive bay.

The TS-h2477AXU-RP is a great choice for businesses with big capacity demands, as it offers a huge storage potential, and Qnap's lack of drive restrictions means you can shop around for your storage media. The appliance performed very well in our 10GbE lab test,s and the latest QuTS hero software is packed with plenty of business apps and smart data protection features.

Qnap TS-h2477AXU-RP specifications