Dell : EMC CLARiiON CX4-960 Networked Storage System

• 1Gb and 10Gb iSCSI, 4Gb and 8Gb Fibre Channel can coexist on the same array
• Cutting edge storage networking technology like FCoE can be easily integrated when available
• Designed to help reduce your power and cooling costs.
• Enterprise Flash Drives, automated performance tiering and up to 2TB cache delivers compelling performance gains
• Now with Unisphere – simplified, integrated management that delivers a superior user experience
• Supports up to 960 Hard Drives in a mix of capacities and technologies, including enterprise flash, Fibre Channel, and Serial ATA
• Stores up to 1.9PB of data
• Customized connectivity with up to 4096 hosts in a SAN and 12 I/O slots

Storage Connectivity

UltraFlex™ modular I/O technology offers the flexibility to easily add more Fibre Channel and/or iSCSI ports to your array as your needs change. You can also easily add future network technologies such as FCoE once it is available, giving you superior investment protection by ensuring compatibility with future storage networking technologies.

Fibre Channel (FC), either 4Gbps or 8Gbps, is a widespread storage networking technology that’s fully supported on Dell/EMC. It's easy for you to integrate Dell/EMC into new or existing Fibre Channel infrastructures that offer high levels of performance

For customers who need flexibility that goes beyond Fibre Channel, iSCSI using traditional 1Gbit Ethernet connectivity is an ideal choice. It leverages your existing Ethernet infrastructure and expertise to deliver cost-effective storage connectivity. Dell/EMC can also deliver the greater bandwidth of 10Gbit iSCSI which will be beneficial to customers who are building out new storage infrastructure or who want to consolidate numerous 1Gbit iSCSI hosts to a single 10Gbit connection.

With CX4 arrays, you have the flexibility to choose both the type and number of ports you need to and optimize your datacenter environment for both performance and flexibility.

Innovation that's Environmentally Responsible

The CX4-120 delivers features such as drive spin down and variable speed fans that deliver environmentally conscious storage to help reduce power consumption. It also can be equipped with low power disk types such as 5.4K SATA and Enterprise Flash.

And now with tight integration into virtual environments (via the CLARiiON Plug-In for vCenter and the EMC Virtual Storage Integrator), the Dell / EMC CX4 family can help you experience new environmental benefits from a fully virtualized datacenter.

Adapting to Change

With support for up to 960 drives and 4096 servers, the CX4-960 can expand to serve even the largest datacenters with ample capacity (up to 1.9PB) and thousands of connections to physical or virtual servers.

It's a platform that helps you adapt to changeby allowing you to easily add more capacity on demand across a wide range of disk types. Whether you use enterprise flash disks, 10K or 15K FC, 7.2K or 5.4K (energy efficient) SATA, as your storage needs change, you can add additional capacity.

Integrated features like thin provisioning and LUN compression also help optimize for growth by reducing the amount of physical disk capacity needed for your data sets.

Seamless data movement

But more capacity is only one part of coping with growing pains. It’s also essential to ensure that your workloads are on disk types that are optimized for the workload. New optional features, just released in August 2010, help you experience new gains in efficiency and simplicity by more flexibly using the compelling performance of Enterprise Flash Drives along with the capacity of SATA.

• Fast Cache: The CX4-120 offers a compelling option for performance optimization which transparently uses enterprise flash disks as read-write second level system cache for workloads on the array.
• FAST: Fully Automated Storage Tiering is an option that moves high performance workloads, in 1GB chunks, to enterprise flash to enhance responsiveness. FAST can also move low performance workloads from Flash or fast Fibre Channel disks to SATA disks to optimize for cost/GB.

For workloads requiring the outstanding performance in mid-range storage, these technologies can work together to reduce or eliminate bottlenecks due to spindle count or workload contention. These technologies help ensure that, based on performance requirements, data exists on the optimal set of disks – and all this data movement happens without your intervention. Simply turn on the feature.

Simplified Management and Data Protection

Dell/EMC CX4 arrays now support a new management paradigm, called Unisphere. This new user interface delivers simplified, task-based administrator control that cuts your time spent, improves reporting, and automates essential tasks. You can use it to manage current and legacy Dell/EMC products, control other Dell/EMC software, and customize your management experience to tightly align with your needs and expectations. Working together this integrated toolkit gives you better responsiveness and reliability to ensure that you attain business objectives.

Dell/EMC storage arrays also support time tested applications that provide advanced data protection, data path management, optimization, replication and migration. These include SnapView™ , MirrorView™ , SAN Copy™ , Replication Manager™ , PowerPath™ , Analyzer and Quality of Service Manager™. These tools help you leverage your Dell/EMC array to create data copies, clones, do remote replication for disaster recovery, and deeply analyze the performance and reliability of your environment.

Solutions

But it’s not enough to have a good product in your datacenter – it has to work with your applications as well. Dell/EMC storage arrays are integrated into Dell's Exchange Microsoft® Exchange® , Microsoft SQL Server® , VMware® , and Oracle® solutions, which offer tested and validated reference architectures to help solve your technology challenges in a tested, optimized approach based on best practices from Dell.