CLARiiON
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The CLARiiON was developed in the early 1990's by Data General Corporation, one of the first minicomputer companies. CLARiiON was an early commercial example of a RAID product and initially sold exclusively as an array with the company's AViiON line of computer systems. Realizing the enormous potential of storage arrays, Data General created a separate CLARiiON division and began selling the product as an OEM offering to its systems competitors. While this somewhat lessened the advantages of AViiON in the marketplace, and was a source of internal corporate friction, it allowed the company to sell higher volumes and popularize the brand. The strategy paid dividends as the company was acquired by EMC in 1999, primarily for the CLARiiON line of products.
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[edit] History
The CLARiiON disk array was started as a Skunkworks project inside Data General and was one of the first and most successful RAID product families introduced in the history of the computer industry. Ironically, shortly after the project's initial development, Tom West, the protagonist of the Pulitzer Prize winning book The Soul of a New Machine, usurped development of the product and led the company's last notable development effort prior to Data General's sale to EMC in 1999.
Patented in 1994, the CLARiiON disk array had some interesting features that are now standard in the data storage and computing industry. Features mentioned in the patent paperwork included hot swappability, guide rails for proper electrical contact, and a method to lock the drives in place once they were secured in the disk enclosure.
The CLARiiON line quickly spanned from 7 slot SCSI disk arrays, to 30 slot SCSI disk arrays. In 1997, Data General's CLARiiON division took the unusual step of adopting an emerging standard - Fibre Channel. The FC5000 array utilized a Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop connection that doubled the performance of SCSI arrays at that time.
From there, the CLARiiON disk arrays grew into a fast, expandable midrange storage platform culminating in the FC5700 under Data General. After EMC acquired Data General, significant development of a new range of CLARiiON arrays took place with the development of the FC4500 and FC4700. Within a couple of years, the first CX series of CLARiiONs (CX200, CX400 and CX600) were developed. Processor and bandwidth upgrades brought us the CLARiiON line (CX300, CX500, CX700) and a low end SATA based CLARiiON array, the AX100 (now updated to AX150). In May 2006, EMC introduced the 3rd generation CX3 UltraScale series of arrays, consisting of the CX3-20, CX3-40 and CX3-80, the industry's only storage platform to leverage end-to-end 4Gb/s Fibre Channel technology.
[edit] CX3 UltraScale Series Hardware
The CLARiiON CX3 UltraScale architecture is designed from the ground up to deliver optimized performance, new levels of scalability, flexible configurations and industry leading availability and reliability.
Each CLARiiON array consists of dual redundant hot swappable components including storage processors, mirrored memory, and battery backup. The CX3-20 and CX3-40 support both Fibre Channel and iSCSI host connectivity while the CX3-80 supports Fibre Channel host connections.
CLARiiON’s UltraPoint Technology includes unique high-availability and data-integrity features that keep information available and protected at all times.
The following are the specs for the CLARiiON CX3 UltraScale systems.
| Array Model | Storage Processors | Cache | Front-end FC Ports | Front-end iSCSI Ports | Back-end Ports | # of Disks Drives | Capacity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CX3-20 | 2 | 4GB | 4 | 8 | 2 | 120 | 59TB |
| CX3-40 | 4 | 8GB | 4 | 8 | 4 | 240 | 119TB |
| CX3-80 | 4 | 16GB | 8 | NA | 8 | 480 | 239TB |
Depending on the model, EMC CLARiiON offers support for Fibre Channel and Serial ATA (SATA) disks. For example, CLARiiON AX100/150 accommodates SATA drives only, and has emulation that presents them as FC disks to the SPs; the CX3 series models 20/40/80 can accommodate both Fibre Channel and SATA disks.
As of January 2007, CLARiiON supports 73 and 146 GB 15,000 rpm 4Gb/s disks; 73, 146, and 300 GB 10,000 rpm 2Gb/s disks; and 500 GB 7,200 rpm 3Gb/s SATA II disks
[edit] CLARiiON Software
All CLARiiON systems—including the entry-level CLARiiON AX150—are designed to be easy to install, manage, and scale to help you save time, keep costs low and protect customer's investments. The CLARiiON Microcode called FLARE provides all the underlying data availability, reliability and advanced functionality of the CLARiiON system. CLARiiON offers the following RAID options: No RAID (pure disk), RAID-0 (striping), RAID-1 (mirroring), RAID-1/0 (striping with mirroring), RAID-3 (striping with parity), and RAID-5 (striping with distributed parity). Various features exist in addition to basic RAID functionality:
Virtual LUN Migration - CLARiiON provides advanced "in the box" data migration tools. LUNs can be moved between RAID types, and between drive types (FC to SATA for instance), online while hosts are accessing data. This simplifies system reconfiguration and also enables tiering within the array based on application types and performance requirements.
Navisphere Manager (array management) - The Navisphere Management Suite is an easy to use task based wizard driven interface that allows you to manage, discover, monitor, and configure EMC CLARiiON storage systems from a Web browser—for complete storage management anytime, anywhere. The array can also be managed through the NaviCLI, a CLI-based tool which may be useful for scripting purposes. Navisphere Analyzer, also part of the Navisphere storage management software suite collects performance information, archives it, and provides graphing and charting for trend analysis and reporting.
Navisphere Quality of Service Manager (application performance management) - EMC Navisphere Quality of Service Manager is a software product that enables customers to monitor and achieve performance objectives for applications. It lets customers decide which applications get more of the available system resources, which enables them to meet service levels on an application-by-application basis. It is designed with an integrated scheduler, to achieve service levels on the most critical applications in the system at any time. It can also be used to monitor application performance on the array to determine possible bottlenecks.
Replication software- CLARiiON also offers replication software to improve backup and recovery processes; implement disaster recovery solutions to meet a variety of Recovery Point Objectives (RPO); offload production systems; and simplify data mobility/migration operations.
