August 6, 2008 – EMC Corp. unveiled the new EMC CLARiiON CX4 Series of midrange storage systems with a new architecture optimized for VMware and other virtual server environments.
The CLARiiON CX4 Series is the latest generation of the CLARiiON family of networked storage systems with new features built-in for virtual server environments – including VMware infrastructure – designed to use less energy, improve storage utilization, performance and management and protect the overall storage investment. These include:
According to the manufacturer, it has 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.
It reportedly has 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.
The systems also has virtual (thin) provisioning capabilities to increase system utilization; built-in disk spin down capabilities and an adaptive cooling design and support for new low power one terabyte SATA disk drives that maximize energy efficiency; and is integrated with VMware Site Recovery Manager to form a simple, turnkey solution for VMware disaster recovery.
For more information: www.emc.com