EMC unveils Clariion arrays with spin-down drives,

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By Kevin Komiega
August 5, 2008 -- EMC today announced the availability of
the Clariion CX4 Series, a new line of midrange storage systems that brings
together a myriad of features and functions -- including support for flash-based
solid-state disks (SSDs), disk spin-down technology, and dual-protocol SAN
connectivity -- that have previously been unavailable to midrange customers in a
single array.
The CX4 family, which is available in four models ranging in capacity from
120TB to 951TB, touts up to twice the performance, memory, capacity, and LUN
connectivity of previous Clariion models and can support multiple application
tiers per array.
The new speeds and capacity points of the Clariion platform have been made
possible through a new 64-bit version of the Clariion FLARE operating system,
which utilizes multi-core Intel processors that improve performance and double
system scalability.
The CX4 features dual-protocol support for Fibre Channel and iSCSI SAN
connections with "online expansion," which will allow users to non-disruptively
incorporate future networking technologies such as 8Gbps Fibre Channel, 10Gbps
iSCSI, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), via I/O connectivity modules as
they become available.
For the power-conscious, the built-in disk spin-down capabilities of the CX4
automatically place inactive drives in sleep mode and activate drives 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. The CX4 family also utilizes
an adaptive cooling design and support for new low-power 1TB SATA disk drives,
which use 32% less energy per terabyte than traditional SATA drives.
EMC also added thin provisioning to the mix in the form of Clariion Virtual
Provisioning, allowing administrators to efficiently provision capacity for
applications.
The aforementioned software features, connectivity options, and power-saving
technologies are by no means new. Throw a rock in the storage industry and you
will hit a vendor offering one or more of the same capabilities somewhere in
their product portfolio. However, two things separate the CX4 from the rest of
the midrange arrays on the market. It represents the first time all of these
features are being offered on one midrange box, and two of the four new Clariion
models support flash-based SSDs.
"With the exception of flash drives, you can find other vendors doing all of
the things EMC is doing in the CX4 such as disk spin-down, iSCSI, replication,
etc., but the whole of this package is greater than the sum of its parts," says
Mark Peters, an analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group.
Peters also says EMC should be given credit for giving midrange customers
access to these storage technologies in a single system. "If anyone else brought
out this product we would be shouting it from the rooftops. EMC has collected
all of the things they could and put them all in one array, but we expect that
from EMC. What is new and different, however, is that EMC is bringing flash
memory down into the midrange."
EMC first incorporated SSDs in its high-end Symmetrix DMX systems earlier
this year. The jury is still out on whether enterprise customers are adopting
the technology and there is some question about whether midrange customers will
pay for extra for performance.
"There is a lot of talk these days about scale-out products -- big, dumb
boxes designed to store all of these files that are flying around. The CX4 is at
the other end of the spectrum and I think there's a market for it," says ESG's
Peters.
Peters says customers are starting to talk about the cost of storage in
different terms. "There is no point in quoting prices per gigabyte anymore. When
you look at price per IOPS, SSDs look very good," he says.
"The price of SSDs will still not be on par with spinning disk because that
is not going to happen any time soon, but EMC is big enough to force others to
take notice and that could drive the economics to where the price [for SSDs] is
somewhere close to sensible," Peters adds.
EMC also believes there is a midrange market for SSD technology. "I don't
think it's an enterprise versus midrange question," says Ruya Atac-Barrett,
EMC's director of Clariion product marketing. "We see mid-tier customers who
inherently recognize the business impact that flash drives can give them with
respect to 30x the processing performance and 10x the response times of
traditional disk. Solid-state disks provide a quantum leap in performance any
place where there is a need for faster processing."
Speeds and feeds
The Clariion CX4 Series comprises four
models, the smallest of which, the CX4-120, is priced from $31,185 and includes
five 146GB disk drives. All of the CX-4 arrays run all of EMC's Clariion
management and replication software, including EMC Navisphere Management Suite,
MirrorView, SnapView, SAN Copy, and other software.
Here is the rundown:
--The Clariion CX4-120 features up to 120 disk drives
for a total capacity of 120TB, 6GB of system memory, and up to 12 Fibre Channel
and/or eight iSCSI ports;
--The CX4-240 features up to 240 drives for a total
capacity of 231TB, 8GB of system memory, and up to 12 Fibre Channel and/or 12
iSCSI ports;
--The CX4-480 features up to 480 drives, including support for
SSDs, for a total capacity of 471TB, 16GB of system memory, and up to 16 Fibre
Channel and/or 12 iSCSI ports; and
--The CX4-960 features up to 960 disk
drives, including SSDs, for a total capacity of 951TB, 32GB of system memory,
and up to 24 Fibre Channel and/or 16 iSCSI ports.
The CX4's UltraFlex architecture includes some software tweaks that allow CX4
arrays to work better in VMware environments. For example, the arrays support
the dynamic addition of I/O ports, along with storage capacity and performance,
to a virtual infrastructure as well as integration with VMware Site Recovery
Manager for VMware Disaster Recovery. In addition, the Clariion CX4 Series
features new integrated continuous remote and local replication (CLR) features
for EMC RecoverPoint/SE software.
The CX4 architecture is also integrated with EMC PowerPath 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.
The Clariion CX4 Series is available from EMC, its Velocity Program Partners,
and Velocity Authorized Services Network (ASN) Partners. It is also being
offered by Dell under the Dell/EMC brand and Fujitsu Siemens Computers under the
FibreCat brand.
Flash drive and virtual provisioning capabilities will be available in
October 2008. Drive spin-down is available for EMC Disk Library today.
               
               
               

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