EMC intros CLARiiON CX4 series

HOPKINTON, USA: EMC Corporation, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, has 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.

The CLARiiON CX4 Series is the latest generation of the market-leading CLARiiON family of networked storage systems, with more than 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:

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• 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. 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, 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.

Rob Robinson, CIO, Forsyth County, said: “The residents of eight cities and towns in the county count on us to make a wide range of information available 7x24, and we needed an affordable storage system that could grow with us while providing the highest levels of availability, performance and energy efficiency.  The CLARiiON CX4 system brought together all of the features we were looking for into a single system that will support our VMware environment serving more than 24 departments and agencies using a range of applications.”

Robinson added: “Setting the new CLARiiON CX4 system up and managing it was simple, and we immediately saw the faster performance, which is especially critical for online human services and public safety applications. In addition, we’re protecting the taxpayer’s investment because our CLARiiON CX4 can be easily upgraded to support future technologies that will enable our IT organization to continue to offer leading information services to the citizens of our communities.”

Mark Peters, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, said: “With this new CLARiiON, EMC is continuing to press hard to address some of the most crucial cost and management challenges faced by storage and IT managers. To achieve that, the CLARiiON CX4 has technical advances on so many fronts simultaneously that it’s hard to find much that is missing. The CLARiiON CX4’s new design and built-in features, including flash drives, are delivered in a highly modular system that can be customized for midrange users’ precise needs. As an incumbent market leader, EMC faces a bar that continually gets set higher, yet the CLARiiON CX4 seems to have cleared the latest height. Overall this is an extremely well thought-out package from EMC.”

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.

David Donatelli, President of the EMC Storage Division, said: “EMC is continuing to use its significant resources and talent to incorporate the innovative features that our customers require into a single, scalable and easy-to-use midrange platform.  We are again pioneering the use of flash drives, this time in midrange storage, and have designed these systems to take full advantage of server virtualization technology. The CLARiiON CX4 Series is unmatched in the industry when it comes to scalability, features, energy efficiency and ease of use. With this next generation of systems, we’ve extended our technology leadership and have widened the competitive gap even further.”

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.