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We sat down with Tom Jepps, QNAP's UK Head of Channel Sales, to talk about why organisations are quietly pulling workloads back on-premise, how QNAP has grown from backup target to enterprise infrastructure platform, and why immutable storage is now at the centre of every serious backup conversation.
Tom Jepps graduated in 2009, spent some time travelling, and came back to find his feet in IT through a graduate sales scheme — entering the industry through distribution. He has been selling QNAP in the UK market for approximately ten years, joining QNAP directly in 2018 as a Channel Account Manager before becoming Head of Channel Sales in October last year.
His role centres on the UK reseller ecosystem — managing a set list of resellers directly while working alongside distributors who hold broader reseller relationships. The job, as he describes it, is to help the channel sell QNAP into the UK market effectively.
QNAP itself is a Taiwanese company founded in 2004. The name stands for Quality Network Appliance Provider — which Tom says gives a useful umbrella for what the company covers. If it relates to storage or networking, QNAP should be able to address it. The company started as a NAS vendor built around a bring-your-own-drives model: QNAP provides the hardware chassis, the operating system, and the firmware. Customers supply the drives themselves.
Tom notes that the Thailand floods of 2004 had an unexpected effect on QNAP's early trajectory. Major vendors like HP and Dell, which bundled their own hard drives, faced significant supply chain disruption. QNAP's model — hardware that didn't require QNAP to supply the drives — meant they were insulated from that disruption. That flexibility accelerated early sales at a critical moment.
What distinguishes QNAP from a basic storage hardware vendor is the software layer. The operating system runs on an app infrastructure — every function the NAS can perform runs as an app. QNAP offers two OS variants: QTS, which runs on an ext4 filesystem, and QuTS hero, which runs on ZFS and adds inline deduplication, data integrity checking, and compression.
The range of functions covers a wide span: backup to cloud, running virtual machines, network camera surveillance, file sharing, and much more. The hardware range is split across enterprise, SMB, and home user segments — with the enterprise push, including all-flash NVMe units, now a significant and growing part of the business.
One of the central threads in the conversation is why organisations are looking again at on-premise NAS after a period of cloud-first thinking. Tom's observation is consistent with what infrastructure teams across the UK are experiencing: the cloud works well for variable, unpredictable workloads, but for data-heavy, predictable, long-lived workloads, the economics don't hold up.
Egress charges, API fees, retrieval costs, and the steady accumulation of subscription costs eventually prompt a reassessment. For organisations that need their data local — whether for performance, compliance, or governance reasons — NAS provides that control back.
"We were seen as a backup target — a backup destination. But if we start to move up the stack and become responsible for the primary data, then we have more use, we have more validity. We can start taking more business off the tier ones."
— Tom Jepps, QNAP UK Head of Channel SalesOne of the most significant capabilities Tom highlights is QNAP's accreditation as an immutable backup target for Veeam. When Veeam released version 12 of their software with an immutability-first approach to backup, passing that vendor testing became a meaningful differentiator.
Most vendors that offer Veeam-compatible immutable storage do so via a cloud target. On-premise immutable storage for Veeam is a much shorter list — Tom notes that competing solutions that have managed it often require impractical configurations, citing one example that needed around 60 hard drives to meet the speed requirements for Veeam's post-backup verification process. QNAP can do it natively, at a fraction of the cost and complexity.
Immutable storage is data that cannot be changed, deleted, or overwritten once written — for a defined period set by the administrator. Ransomware works by encrypting or modifying files so they become unreadable. An immutable volume cannot be altered by ransomware — the data has no writable permission during the immutability window.
QNAP implements immutability natively through WORM (Write Once, Read Many) volumes and through Q Objects — S3-compatible object storage running on the NAS itself. This means an organisation can have an immutable backup destination fully on-premise, without relying on a cloud S3 bucket.
Tom is clear that immutability needs to apply at every stage of the backup chain. A QNAP-to-QNAP architecture with immutability enabled on both units covers the full 3-2-1 backup strategy entirely on-premise.
QNAP's move into the enterprise market has been driven significantly by its all-flash NVMe product range. The jump in performance between NVMe flash and SATA flash is many times greater than the jump between spinning disk and SATA. Once you deploy NVMe storage, the network becomes the bottleneck — which is why QNAP's NVMe units ship with 25GiG networking natively.
This created a secondary problem: when QNAP first released those units, 25GiG switches were scarce and expensive — Tom recalls a switch with only a couple of 25GiG ports costing around £4,000. QNAP's response was to enter the networking market themselves. They now offer a switch with 16 × 25GiG ports for approximately £1,000 — making the full high-performance stack accessible for mid-market organisations.
QNAP has just announced a new 60-bay top-loading JBOD expansion chassis that fits in 4U of rack space — a substantial increase in density over the previous maximum of 24 bays. QNAP has also confirmed compatibility with Seagate's 30TB hard drives. Put 30TB drives in a 60-bay unit and you have 1.8PB of raw storage in a single 4U chassis. For organisations concerned about rack space at petabyte scale, Tom's point is simple: that's no longer a limiting factor.
QNAP has had a built-in hypervisor for a very long time, but the VMware/Broadcom situation has brought this conversation into sharper focus. QNAP offers VM hosting with no additional licensing charge — you run VMs on a QNAP using ISO files of whatever OS you want, and the cost ends there.
The enterprise hardware range has expanded the capability significantly. The TDS unit ships with two Intel CPUs and supports up to 1TB of RAM running off NVMe SSDs. The ES1090 takes a different approach: a single AMD EPYC CPU with 25GiG networking and the same 1TB RAM ceiling, with a core and thread count that approaches the dual-CPU unit. Eight surveillance camera licences are included free with every NAS. The hypervisor remains unlicensed.
Beyond NAS file protocols, QNAP supports iSCSI block storage on most units with Intel-class CPUs — making it an IP SAN target. NFS v4 and SMB are both supported. For fibre channel environments, QNAP supports 16GiG and 32GiG FC connections. For organisations requiring 100% redundancy and no single point of failure, QNAP offers dual controller units with full controller-level redundancy.
Tom is direct about the inherent risk in any network-connected storage device. Out of the box, admin accounts are disabled on setup, default passwords must be changed, and two-factor authentication is available. QNAP supports FIPS-compliant AES-256 encryption and snapshotting. Active Directory integration simplifies user management significantly. His framing on ransomware is pragmatic: prevention and recovery are both essential — the immutability features protect the backup copy, and the ability to recover quickly is equally important.
Because QNAP doesn't manufacture the hard drives or SSDs, hardware proof of concepts carry a cost that makes them impractical for single-unit opportunities. For a multi-unit rollout, yes. For a single-device evaluation, no. What QNAP does offer is a remote sandbox — units set up at their Swindon office that customers can access to test the firmware, validate configurations, and get comfortable with the platform before purchase.
Tom is candid about how QNAP's support has evolved. When he joined in 2018, there was no UK office — support was handled by the Netherlands and Taiwan. There is now a first-line support team based in Swindon, covering phone and email with remote access capability. Desktop units carry three years standard warranty. Enterprise and rack units ship with five years standard. On-site support is available through QNAP's UK partner support network, with SLA options ranging from next business day five days a week, through four-hour response five days a week, to 24/7 response. Out-of-warranty units can also be brought back into support.
Tom identifies media and entertainment as one of QNAP's strongest verticals — driven partly by Thunderbolt connectivity, which QNAP offers and very few NAS vendors match. Approximately 15 to 20% of UK deal registrations fall into this vertical, with a similar share in higher education and the public sector. His broader answer when asked about verticals: anyone with data. The sweet spot is organisations in the 100 to 1,000 user range.
QNAP is moving into AI on two fronts. New products with built-in GPUs are coming, enabling machine learning workloads to run directly on the NAS. AI is also being integrated into existing software — in the surveillance application, facial recognition and number plate recognition are already available. Tom gives a concrete use case: door access systems linked to face recognition, so a recognised visitor triggers a door to open while an unrecognised person cannot. These capabilities exist on QNAP today.
The picture Tom Jepps paints is of a platform that has grown well beyond its origins as a backup target. Modern QNAP hardware supports primary data workloads, VM hosting, all-flash NVMe performance, petabyte-scale capacity, block storage, AI inference, and enterprise-grade immutable backup — all within a bring-your-own-drives model that keeps costs predictable and avoids vendor lock-in. Fortuna Data works with QNAP as a reseller and can help specify the right configuration for your requirements.