EMC Goes 4-Gig

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EMC has finally joined the 4-gig party on Monday, upgrading its Clariion line with a new architecture that supports full 4Gbps Fibre Channel technology.

The new Clariion UltraScale architecture and CX3 series of networked storage systems also feature double the capacity of the CX2 series to help customers merge multiple types of files onto one machine.

Such consolidation has been the battle cry in a storage market where customers are craving more space and clamoring for simplified machines to sock away files and recall them as fast as possible.

EMC is counting on the UltraScale design and CX3 line to elevate sales of its Clariion systems, a consistent growth area for EMC over the last several years, including a 13 percent hike in the first quarter 2006 from the year-ago quarter.

Jay Krone, director of Clariion marketing for EMC, said the full 4Gbps mark is a throughput speed that every vendor in the market has been racing to offer, claiming that only EMC has achieved the goal in midrange systems thanks to native multi-lane PCI Express technology. That said, LSI Logic — an OEM provider for IBM — also unveiled end-to-end 4-gig midrange systems on Monday.

Because 4Gbps heads off bottlenecks that can hinder application performance, Krone said EMC is confident its new Clariion systems are, bit for byte, more powerful than systems from rivals HP and IBM.

“Because we buy our competitors’ products and we benchmark them and pop the top off and look inside and see what they’re built out of, we’re pretty confident at this point that our major competitors have a controller architecture that is a last generation architecture that fundamentally limits their ability to perform in a four gigabit-per-second world,” Krone said.

UltraScale affords customers other benefits over existing Clariion and rival systems, Krone said.

They include: easier installation; the ability to copy data up to 30 percent faster using EMC’s SnapView, MirrorView and SAN Copy replication software; greater availability; redundant power and cooling; and improved fault detection, isolation and error-correction.

The CX3 line includes three models.

The entry-level CX3-20 was created for mail/messaging, departmental applications and databases, Web services, distributed applications, remote replication and workgroup productivity. The machine starts at $27,000 and can scale from 365 gigabytes to 59 terabytes.

For enterprises that require more juice and storage, the CX3-40 is ideal for mail/messaging, heavy databases, transactional workloads, bandwidth applications, video streaming and remote replication.

The CX3-40 supports 2-Gb/s LC/FC disk drives, 2-Gb/s Fibre Channel disk drives and 4-Gb/s Fibre Channel disk drives in the same system, and scales up to 119 terabytes. The machine begins at $52,000.

Lastly, the CX3-80 is what Krone described as the new “kingpin” of the midrange. For $101,000 to start, the CX3-80 performs tasks normally reserved for enterprise-class arrays, including tiered storage, backup-to-disk and data warehousing.

Like the CX-40, the CX3-80 supports 2-Gb/s LC/FC disk drives, 2-Gb/s Fibre Channel disk drives and 4-Gb/s Fibre Channel disk drives in the same system. But the CX3-80 can store up to 239 terabytes.

The CX3-20, CX3-40, CX3-80 models are available now from EMC and partners Dell, Fujitsu Siemens Computers and Unisys. iSCSI connectivity and Network Equipment Building System requirements will be available later this year.

Thanks to its five-year reseller deal with EMC, Dell will begin selling co-branded versions of the CX3-20 array for $27,000 later this month worldwide.

Article courtesy of InternetNews.com

Clint Boulton
Clint Boulton
Clint Boulton is an Enterprise Storage Forum contributor and a senior writer for CIO.com covering IT leadership, the CIO role, and digital transformation.

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