You may have noticed this press release today from QNAP. Here’s the short story.

QNAP sells Network Attached Storage (NAS) solutions. Their products also have an application store - known as Virtualization Station - that enables their customers to run free and paid business applications on the NAS. In essence this creates what can be called a “data center in a box”. It is great for businesses who want to run a contained data center on their premises - where it may not make sense for cost, control, or compliance reasons to shift it all to a cloud service provider.

Turns out, the Virtualization Station is getting strong traction with QNAP users. Not surprisingly, customers realize it would be a really good idea to have a firewall available to protect critical data and applications. In fact, their customers asked for pfSense® specifically, hence the partnership between Netgate and QNAP.

We expect pfSense® software to be commercially available in the Virtualization Station by early second quarter, 2018.

pfSense software is a great solution, of course. But at some point, depending on the applications being run, and the amount of data being pushed to or pulled from the QNAP platform, it may encounter limits on performance. Because QNAP is growing in popularity not only with small to medium business (SMB) customers, but also small to medium enterprise (SME) customers, performance limits are a concern. This is why you see - later in the press release - a statement about higher performance and more advanced management capabilities that we expect to roll into QNAP products in the near future. You can get a glimpse of those products here.