Product Name: Clariion CX4
Codename: Fleet
Developer: EMC Storage Division (ESD)
Model Numbers: CX4-120, CX4-240, CX4-480 and CX4-960
Dual protocol support: FC and iSCSI
Operating System: FLARE 28 (64 Bit)
Key Features: UltraFlex Architecture, FLASH and Low Power SATA II drive support, Virtual Provisioning, Drive Spin Down, Adaptive Cooling, Navisphere Quality of Service, Navisphere Analyzer, RecoverPoint, Virtual LUN/MetaLUN, SAN Copy, SnapView, MirrorView, Persistent Cache, VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V support, Fully customer installable.
Well here it is, one of the worst kept secrets in the industry but with more than 300K Clariion systems sold to date a 31% share of the market (making it the leader by miles) and with a massive partner and channel program to pre-brief I'm surprised it didn't leak sooner.
The first time I saw the new skins I called it "Terminator Chic", or maybe it looks like it's a Cylon I'm not sure, either way what's on the inside has changed far more than what's on the outside.
The new new thing? UltraFlex.
As is usual performance, memory and scale all go 2x but one of the biggest design changes is that the I/O complex has been separated from the CPU complex giving customers more I/O adapter flexibility.
Connectivity expansion and swaps can now occur online as all the I/O modules are hot pluggable. No need to take an SP down and crack the top if you want to add additional FC/iSCSI adapters or want to move to a higher performance connectivity technology. New software tools and wizards have been added to Navi Manager to manage and monitor the I/O modules.
Enterprise FLASH Drives are available to provide higher performance Tier 0 on the CX4-480 and CX4-960. One of the first questions after the EFD launch earlier this year was when FLASH would be available for Clariion. Well here it is, the first and currently the only mid-range storage arrays offering EFDs as an option while leveraging the years of R&D we've spent on FLASH technology. Not only are they as fast as you'd expect (Which is stupidly fast but we've been through that during the FLASH for DMX launch) but they're also energy efficient taking 38% less energy to store 1TB of data than a traditional mechanical disk drive.
All systems are enabled for Virtual Provisioning and Spin Down. Clariion now joins Symmetrix and Celerra in offering Virtual Provisioning and those ease of use benefits now come into play.
Spin Down is already shipping with the EMC Disk Library 4000 series today leveraging the spin down technology which has been added to FLARE. This along with Adaptive Cooling and drive options such as FLASH and 1TB low power SATA II works to improve energy efficiency across the system which puts money where the EMC's mouth is when it comes to things like Wikibon's Conserve IT initiative.
RecoverPoint support used to be a patch to FLARE 26 but has now been merged into FLARE 28 offering local (CDP) and remote (CRR) replication options to Clariion. I'm a big fan of RecoverPoint having worked with it since it was Kashya and find it a technology without peer when it comes to block level replication. There's a lot RecoverPoint can do for people and if given the option to use it I'm sure a lot of people will.
Ease of use is as big a deal in this generation as it was in the last generation. The CX4 designed to be fully customer installable with the Clariion Interactive Installation Guide taking customers from unpacking the unit to connecting hosts. The company has seen massive uptake of products such as the NS20 and NS40 unified storage platforms which allow customers to do this work themselves. However EMC or it's partners can still do that work for you if required.
Previously VMware has benefited from MetaLUN technology to provide real time LUN expansion of RDM and VMFS without a requiring a reboot. Navisphere Quality of Service Manager along with VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler to enforce application performance policies while balancing resource capacity. Virtual LUN technology to provide non disruptive tiering of virtual machines and now it should be pointed out that VMFS is "Virtual Provisioning" friendly while the the RecoverPoint Adapter for VMware Site Recovery Manager allows Clariion customers to protect and recover everything from a single virtual machine to entire ESX servers with ease.
Those are just some of the reasons why so many more customers choose EMC for their VMware environment than anyone else.Now it's time to do it again for an emerging crop of customers. As of the August release of the EMC Support Matrix CX4 is Microsoft Hyper-V certified. VMware value add has been developed over the years but now that Microsoft are shipping a product expect to see EMC leverage it's technology relationship with Microsoft to provide a superior solution for Hyper-V customers.
There's more. It's a big release with a lot of work and a lot more to come. At this stage I'm glad people can start publicly talking about it.
When we look at the mid-range market we see two large entities who's offerings appear to be frozen in time and a bunch of smaller players living out on the fringe waving individual features around the place and pretending they're differentiators. Some of these differentiators work better than others, some have been tested and work well others have not been tested extensively and don't. History shows they're never differentiators for long if they're broadly adopted. If customers scramble for it everyone will jump on board eventually.
What this release should highlight is that no one out there, and I mean no one, is spending as much money in research and development and in bringing whole products (Not just jabbering about a specific feature to anyone who'll listen), to market than EMC.
We'll talk again about other things before the year is out, but the CX4 starts shipping to customers today.
