EMC intros Clariion CX4 Series

HOPKINTON, USA: EMC has today unveiled the new EMC CLARiiON CX4 Series of midrange storage systems.  With a new architecture specifically optimized for VMware and other virtual server environments and designed to incorporate the latest technologies in drives, connectivity, processing power, thin provisioning and security, EMC is making it easier than ever to cost-effectively consolidate and manage information using the least amount of energy.

The CLARiiON CX4 Series is the latest generation of CLARiiON family of networked storage systems, with 300,000 systems installed and a midrange storage leading benchmark of “Five 9’s” of availability – 99.999 percent uptime. 

With data growing at nearly 60 percent annually and information technology managers facing increased energy costs and tighter budgets, the new CLARiiON CX4 Series has a multitude of new features built-in that are ideal for virtual server environments – including VMware infrastructure – use less energy, improve storage utilization, performance and management and protect the overall storage investment.  These include:

Up to twice the performance, twice the capacity, twice the memory and twice the number of LUNs (logical unit numbers) of previous generations, enabling support of multiple application tiers on a single CLARiiON CX4 array.

This is the result of a new 64 bit EMC CLARiiON FLARE® storage operating environment utilizing multi-core Intel processors that improve performance and double system scalability (up to 960 drives) for improved consolidation. 

The ability to support dual-protocol Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage area network (SAN) connections with online expansion, a unique feature in the market.  EMC’s new UltraFlex™ technology also enables the CLARiiON CX4 Series to easily and non-disruptively incorporate future connectivity technologies such as 8Gb/s Fibre Channel, 10Gb/s iSCSI and FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet).

 In addition, the CLARiiON CX4 Series with UltraFlex helps extend the flexibility of VMware environments by now enabling the dynamic addition of I/O ports – along with storage capacity and performance – to the virtual infrastructure.

Being the first midrange storage array in the market to support state-of-the-art solid state disks (SSDs), which are more than 30 times faster than traditional drives, deliver sub-millisecond response times and are 98 percent more energy efficient on an IOPs (Input/Output operations Per Second) basis. 

The addition of flash drives to the CLARiiON CX4 Series provides the highest levels of performance for “tier 0” storage requirements.  Earlier this year, EMC became the first enterprise storage vendor to incorporate SSDs into its core portfolio with the introduction of flash technology in its high-end Symmetrix® DMX Series.

Virtual (thin) provisioning capabilities that increase system utilization and simplify the provisioning of storage by allowing administrators to present an application with more capacity than is physically allocated. 

With new CLARiiON Virtual Provisioning, capacity can be quickly and easily allocated for physical, VMware and other virtual servers while monitoring features and automated alerts allow storage pools to be expanded online. EMC first introduced its virtual provisioning capabilities on the EMC Celerra® family of IP (internet protocol) storage systems.

Built-in disk spin down capabilities that will automatically place inactive drives in sleep mode and activate on demand to save energy.  This policy-based feature – which EMC first offered in its EMC Disk Library virtual tape systems – is designed for applications that have regular spans of time with little or no activity.

An adaptive cooling design and support for new low power one terabyte SATA disk drives that maximize energy efficiency.  With this new design, the amount of energy used to cool the system can be significantly reduced as cooling fans vary speeds as needed to maintain the proper temperature. 

The new low power drives, which spin at a slower RPM, use 32 percent less energy per terabyte than traditional SATA drives.

Integration with VMware Site Recovery Manager to form a simple, turnkey solution for VMware disaster recovery. 

In addition, the CLARiiON CX4 Series features new integrated continuous local and remote replication (CLR) features for EMC RecoverPoint/SE software that simplify deployment in both Fibre Channel and iSCSI environments and optimize bandwidth.

Integration with the RSA enVision® platform to provide a comprehensive, automated approach for the management of event data, maximize an organization’s security posture and simplify compliance.

The CLARiiON CX4 Series is also integrated with EMC PowerPath® path management software with encryption and key management technology from RSA, which can encrypt and decrypt data at the host as it is sent to and from the array. 

Forsyth County, which encompasses the Winston-Salem area of North Carolina, beta tested and is implementing an EMC CLARiiON CX4 storage system as part of a virtualized information infrastructure that provides services to more than 330,000 citizens.

The CLARiiON CX4 Series is comprised of four models, which are supported by all CLARiiON management and replication software including EMC Navisphere Management Suite, EMC MirrorView, EMC SnapView, EMC SAN Copy and other software.  The new models include:

CLARiiON CX4-120, which features up to 120 disk drives for a total capacity of 120 TB (terabytes), 6 GB (gigabytes) of system memory and up to 12 Fibre Channel and/or 8 iSCSI ports.

CLARiiON CX4-240, which features up to 240 disk drives for a total capacity of 231 TB, 8 GB of system memory and up to 12 Fibre Channel and/or 12 iSCSI ports. 

·         CLARiiON CX4-480, which features up to 480 disk drives including SSDs for a total capacity of 471 TB, 16 GB of system memory and up to 16 Fibre Channel and/or 12 iSCSI ports.

CLARiiON CX4-960, which features up to 960 disk drives including SSDs for a total capacity of 951 TB, 32 GB of system memory and up to 24 Fibre Channel and/or 16 iSCSI ports.