14 DAY TRIAL // QNAP Systems, Inc., a Taiwanese corporation known for creating NAS solutions for storage management, file sharing, surveillance, and virtualization applications, has recently announced that they are moving to offering IoT apps.
It's a bold move, but even if we don't realize it yet, IoT (Internet of Things) is the future, and like any other corporation out there that wants to survive today's economy and fast-changing technology landscape, it keeps up with the latest trends.
Canonical's Thibaut Rouffineau reports on the QNAP announcement, as the Taiwanese company prepares for a major change in their infrastructure, and they are planning on adopting the company's Snap packages as the application format of choice for their NAS solutions.
Of course, by choosing to offer their customers up-to-date, confined and secure IoT applications, QNAP has also adopted the Snappy Ubuntu Core operating system, a slimmed-down flavor of Ubuntu Linux designed for embedded and IoT devices.
"The key benefit of using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Snaps is that developers can build their applications in a single format that will work across desktop and IoT - which dramatically lowers costs linked to cross-platform management, migration, and re-engineering," says Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Canonical.
QNAP NAS will use Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
As expected, QNAP has entered into partnership with Canonical, which will help the Taiwanese company get their infrastructure ready for deploying IoT apps to their NAS users, thus providing them with an intuitive desktop computer experience.
With this move, both Canonical and QNAP are encouraging IoT developers to build their apps in the Snap package format for the QNAP NAS platform, which will also use its mature QTS operating system.
Best of all, QNAP has announced that QNAP Linux Station 1.1.893 is available now from the QTS App Center, offering support for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), which comes with built-in Snap package support.
Please try to keep in mind that to install QNAP Linux Station 1.1.893 on your QNAP NAS station, you will need to have at least 4GB of RAM. The new Snap-based IoT NAS solution from QNAP is currently demoed at Computex, which takes place these days. QNAP's booth is at J0830.