EMC Boosts CX Performance

EMC this week is introducing its new Clariion CX3 series of midrange storage arrays and delivering on recent promises by EMC Chairman, President and CEO Joe Tucci to refresh its Clariion line with not just a bump in performance, but with a whole new architecture.

Jay Krone, director of Clariion platform marketing for the Hopkinton, Mass.-based company, said the new Clariions were redesigned for performance and scalability. They are the first storage arrays in the industry to be based on native PCI Express technology, and the first to ship with end-to-end 4-Gbps Fibre Channel, he said.

The end-to-end 4-Gbps Fibre Channel technology is important in increasing storage performance, Krone said. While other storage arrays may be coming to market with a 4-Gbps front end and 4-Gbps hard drives, they still have the last generation of 2-Gbps controllers, which can cause a bottleneck in performance, he said.

Don McNaughton, sales manager at HorizonTek, a Huntington, N.Y.-based solution provider, said using end-to-end 4-Gbps Fibre Channel puts EMC ahead of the technology curve compared with other vendors.

Fibre Channel switch and host-bus adapter manufacturers are already bringing 4-Gbps products to the channel, and companies such as QLogic are starting to phase out the 2-Gbps products, McNaughton said.

“We’ve been telling customers who are putting in new switches to put in 4-Gbps products now because all the arrays will be 4-Gbps soon,” he said.

The new CX3 family includes three models, Krone said. The CX3-20 has a 4-Gbyte cache and supports up to 120 hard drives for a capacity of up to 59 Tbytes. The CX3-40 has double the cache and capacity of the CX3-20. And the CX3-80 has a maximum capacity of 239 Tbytes.

The CX-series is scheduled to ship later this week through EMC’s distributors. With a base configuration of 365 Gbytes, the CX3-20 has a list price of $27,000, while the CX3-40 is priced at $52,000 and the CX3-80 is $101,000.