Benefit from proven CLARiiON 99.999 percent availability and innovative technologies like Flash drives, virtual provisioning, 64-bit operating system, and multi-core processors. Enjoy UltraFlex™ technology, which gives you dual-protocol, online-expandable connectivity options and the ability to integrate future technologies. And leverage advanced CX4 functionality to protect your data from unexpected events and to decrease energy use.

The EMC® CLARiiON® CX4 series delivers industry-leading innovation in midrange storage with the fourth-generation CLARiiON CX storage platform. The unique combination of flexible, scalable hardware design and advanced software capabilities enables EMC CLARiiON CX4 series systems, powered by Intel Xeon processors, to meet the growing and diverse needs of today’s midsize and large enterprises.

Through innovative technologies like Flash drives, UltraFlex™ technology, and CLARiiON Virtual Provisioning customers can decrease costs and energy use and optimize availability and virtualization. All this is available with a choice of systems ranging from affordable entry-level solutions to high-performance, maximum-capacity configurations for the most demanding requirements.

The powerful CX4 series includes the CX4 model 120, CX4 model 240, CX4 model 480, and CX4 model 960. All models come pre-configured with Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity, allowing customers to choose the best connectivity for their specific applications.

Delivering up to twice the performance and scale as the previous CLARiiON generation, CLARiiON CX4 is the leading midrange storage solution to meet a full range of needs—from departmental applications to data-center-class business-critical systems.

EMC CLARiiON CX4 Technology Advancements

Tier “0” Flash drives: EMC-customized Flash drive technology provides low latency and high throughput to break the performance barriers of traditional disk technology. EMC is the first to bring Flash drives to midrange storage and expects the technology to become mainstream over the next few years while revolutionizing networked storage.

Flash drives extend the storage tiering capabilities of CLARiiON by:

• Establishing a new tier “0” with 30 times the IOPS of a 15K RPM FC drive
• Consistently delivering less than 1 ms response times
• Requiring 98 percent less energy per I/O than 15K rpm Fibre Channel drives
• Weighing 58 percent less per TB than a typical Fibre Channel drive
• Providing better reliability due to no moving parts and faster RAID rebuilds

UltraFlex technology: The CLARiiON CX4 architecture features UltraFlex technology—a combination of a modular connectivity design and unique FLARE® operating environment software capabilities that deliver:

• Dual protocol support with FC and iSCSI as the base configuration on all models
• Easy, online expansion via hot-pluggable I/O modules
• Ability to easily add and/or upgrade I/O modules to accommodate future technologies as they become available (i.e., 8 Gb/s FC, 10 Gb/s iSCSI)

CLARiiON Virtual Provisioning: Allows CLARiiON users to present an application with more capacity than is physically allocated to it in the storage array. CLARiiON Virtual Provisioning can lower total cost of ownership and offers customers these benefits:

• Efficient tiering that improves capacity utilization and optimizes tiering capabilities across all drive types
• Ease of provisioning that simplifies and accelerates processes and delivers “just-in-time” capacity
  allocation and flexibility
• Comprehensive monitoring, alerts, and reporting for efficient capacity planning
• Supports advanced capabilities including Virtual LUN, Navisphere QoS Manager, Navisphere Analyzer, and SnapView

Multi-core Intel Xeon processors, increased memory, and 64-bit FLARE: The CX4 boasts up to twice the performance of the previous generation and provides up to 2.5 times more processing power with multi-core Intel® Xeon® processors. The CX4 architecture also delivers twice the capacity scale (up to 960 drives), twice the memory, and twice the LUNs than the previous generation CLARiiON.

With the CLARiiON CX4, the FLARE operating environment has also been upgraded from a 32-bit to a 64-bit environment. This enhancement enables the scalability improvements and also provides the foundation for more advanced software functionality such as Virtual Provisioning.

Low-power SATA II drives, adaptive cooling and drive spin-down:

• Low-power SATA II drives deliver the highest density at the lowest cost and require 96 percent less energy per terabyte than 15K rpm Fibre Channel drives, and 32 percent less than traditional 7.2K rpm 1 TB SATA drives.
• Adaptive cooling is a new feature that provides improved energy efficiency by dynamically adjusting cooling and airflow within the CX4 arrays based on system activity.
• Drive spin-down allows customers to set policies at the RAID group level to place inactive drives in sleep mode. Target applications include backup-to-disk, archiving, and test and development.

Save energy, protect data, and virtualize—at a low cost of ownership

Lowest cost of ownership: CLARiiON CX4 systems deliver the scale, performance, and advanced technologies to run your infrastructure for less. The CX4 series allows customers to take cost out of their business in the following ways:

• Consolidating twice the workload in a single system. Competing storage providers require customers to deploy multiple arrays to equal the performance and scalability of a single CX4.
• Optimize storage capacity. Customers can provision less often by leveraging CLARiiON virtual provisioning. This means rather than buying additional capacity upfront, customers can reduce and/ or defer initial capacity requirements and save on acquisition and energy costs by running their systems at higher utilization rates and adding capacity as needed without disrupting applications. Additionally, CLARiiON’s unique Virtual LUN technology allows customers to move data nondisruptively between storage tiers as requirements change.
• Future-proof your investment. The CX4 series provides investment protection. Via UltraFlex technology. Built into CLARiiON CX4, this expandable connectivity lets customers add future connectivity like 8 Gb/s FC and 10 Gb/s iSCSI rather than buying another system to support new technology. Additionally, data-in-place upgrades allow for in-family and cross-CX-series-generation upgrades to CX4 while leveraging prior investments in drives, disk enclosures, I/O modules, and system software.

Save energy

• CLARiiON CX4 power-saving technologies allow customers to reduce energy use—without sacrificing performance or scalability.
• Flash drives provide 98 percent better efficiency per I/O than with 15K FC disks, and 30 times the performance.
• Low-power SATA drives use 96 percent less energy per TB versus 15K FC drives and 32 percent less energy than traditional SATA disks.
• Policy-based disk spin-down automatically places inactive drives in sleep mode; activates on-demand to meet application requirements.
• Adaptive cooling dynamically adjusts cooling based on system activity.