QSAN XF5 Series — Flagship All-NVMe Block Storage
Pure FlashArray performance, materially less spend.
The QSAN XF5 series (XF5226) is the flagship of QSAN's NVMe block storage line — extreme-performance NVMe with ultra-low 100µs latency on PCIe Gen4. Engineered for mission-critical Australian workloads such as real-time analytics, financial systems, and AI inference, the XF5 delivers tier-1 performance at price points that consistently land 40–50% below Pure Storage FlashArray and Dell PowerStore.
XEVO 3 brings mirrored firmware HA, complete RAID protection (0/1/3/5/6/10/30/50/60 plus N-way mirror plus RAID EE for fast rebuilds), QThin thin provisioning with space reclamation, QSnap snapshots up to 4096 per system, QReplica synchronous and asynchronous replication with traffic shaping. Dual-active SAN controllers with NTB-bus cache mirroring, ALUA, multipath I/O, zero-downtime firmware updates. New host-card options: 2x 32Gb FC SFP28 and 2x 25GbE SFP28 per slot.
QSAN's flash-management story is a structural differentiator: QSLife monitors SSD wear and predicts replacements before they become emergencies; QSRAID optimises endurance across the array. Both are native to XEVO 3 — no bolt-on third-party tooling required. The shared hardware platform with the [XN5 series](/vendors/qsan/products/xn5-series) unified array also gives Australian customers a future-proofing path: the chassis is the same; controllers can be swapped to add file protocols later.
Controllers
Dual active-active controllers (HA) with mirrored firmware
Drive Bays
26-bay NVMe (2.5" U.2 NVMe SSDs) in 2U
Latency
100µs (claimed) on PCIe Gen4 NVMe
Operating System
XEVO 3 — flash-optimised data management with mirrored firmware HA
Availability
99.9999%+ — fully modular redundant architecture
Networking
2x 32Gb FC SFP28 or 2x 25GbE SFP28 host cards per controller, plus built-in 10GbE iSCSI
Data Services
QThin, QSnap (up to 4096), QReplica sync/async, RAID EE, sync replication for zero RPO
Flash Management
QSLife SSD health, QSRAID endurance, Cache-to-Flash via M.2 + BBU
Hardware Platform
Shared chassis with XN5 series and KS2 (qs_hm_XF52-XN52)
The XF5 lands head-on against Pure Storage FlashArray //X70, Dell PowerStore 1200T, NetApp AFF C800, and HPE Alletra 6000. Pure and NetApp win on polished software ecosystems and SnapMirror / Purity feature depth. QSAN wins on pricing (40–50% below for comparable raw NVMe IOPS), third-party drive support, and XEVO 3 mirrored firmware HA. For Australian customers with realistic five-year TCO sensitivity, the XF5 delivers the same architectural class without the tier-1 vendor markup.
One of the advantages of working with CRS — we can recommend the best combination of vendors for your specific needs.
NAKIVO
NAKIVO protects XF5 production workloads with VAAI / ODX-integrated agentless backup at NVMe speed.
Proxmox
Proxmox VE clusters use XF5 over FC or iSCSI for tier-1 VM hosting — open-source virtualisation at enterprise performance.
StoneFly
Replicate XF5 volumes to StoneFly air-gapped immutable DR for ransomware resilience.
StarWind
StarWind VTL on XF5 delivers tier-1 backup-target performance for large enterprise estates.
QSAN XF5 Series is available through Cloud Ready Solutions and our network of authorised partners across Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific.
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