EMC Adds Lower Cost Clariion, Disaster Recovery Products

EMC on Tuesday brought its new Clariion CX3 family down a notch pricewise with the introduction of a new entry-level version, and complemented it with a lower-cost version of its disaster recovery and replication software.

EMC's new Clariion CX3-10, which lists starting at $27,000 with five 146-Gbyte hard drives, includes four 4-Gbit-per-second Fibre Channel and four iSCSI ports, and scales to up to 30 Tbytes, said Pete Koliopoulos, vice president of global channel marketing for the Hopkinton, Mass.-based storage vendor. EMC introduced the CX3 family in May.

The CX3-10 is a channel-friendly array that includes two new service tools for solution providers, Koliopoulos said.

The first is the Clariion Interactive Installation Guide, a set of tools and processes for installing the array and ensuring that best practices are followed, Koliopoulos said.

The second is the Clariion Disk Replacement Utility, a set of tools to allow solution providers to quickly identify a failed hard drive, disable the drive, and integrate a new drive.

Also new with the CX3-10 is an entry-level version of EMC's RecoverPoint data replication and continuous data protection (CDP) software, which the company got with its acquisition of Kashya in May.

The new version, RecoverPoint/SE, was modified for the Clariion family to operate in a Windows-only environment to provide data replication between any two Clariion CX or CX3 arrays. The software allows customers to define replication policies based on their recovery time objectives. One license for RecoverPoint/SE lists for about $10,000.

Keith Norbie, director of the storage division of Nexus Information Systems, a Plymouth, Minn.-based solution provider, said the new CX3-10 is finally meeting a key price point between EMC's low-cost AX150 arrays and its midrange Clariions.

"A lot of deals are going to companies like EqualLogic and other vendors at that price point below the Clariion CX3-20," Norbie said. "So coming out with the CX3-10 will be a big help."

EMC's introduction of RecoverPoint/SE also demonstrates the vendor's realization that software is the key differentiation of its offering, Norbie said. "People are looking at different approaches to replicating data for applications like Microsoft Exchange" he said. "With the advent of low-cost arrays from companies like Hewlett-Packard, Network Appliance, and EqualLogic, the value is no longer in the hardware. EMC has done a pretty good job of managing its software."

Charles Edge, partner at 318, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based solution provider, said there are many options for buying comparable storage at a lower price. "The CX3-10 is for someone looking at growing into a larger SAN," Edge said. "As an entry-level SAN product, it seems price-competitive."

Both the CX3-10 and RecoverPoint/SE are currently available.

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