EMC Celerra

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Celerra is the family name for EMC's Network Attached Storage (NAS) products. It comes in either a gateway or integerated configuration in 3 different models. Physically, a Celerra system occupies from 2U up to a full standard size rack enclosure and consists of one or two Celerra Control Stations, (1U servers running EMC's hardened Linux variant), and one or more Celerra X-Blades (also called Data movers,) which are the "NAS heads" running the DART (Data Access in Real Time) operating system that serve data.

The Celerra can be attached to one or more EMC storage systems, either the CLARiiON or DMX. The Celerra X-Blades are themselves SAN-attached to the storage system and take the place of an actual SAN attached file server; they then present file shares to the network environment using CIFS, NFS, or FTP. For high performance applications EMC Celerra Multi-Path File System (MPFS/MPFSi ) can be used. Beside the file sharing capabilities the Celerra can also provide iSCSI LUNs. The Celerra Data Movers have multiple copper gigabit Ethernet ports (some have optical gigabit Ethernet ports), for handling requests from multiple customer VLANs; Multiple HBAs, for storage access or for backup traffic using NDMP. Depending on model, each data mover can typically control up to 36 TB of FC and ATA disk before beginning to degrade in responsiveness. A fully-built Celerra NSX can present a maximum of approximately 168 terabytes of storage and support thousands of simultaneous connections to users; to expand beyond this, multiple Celerras can be managed as a single system.

The X-Blades have no administrative services presented on their customer-facing network interfaces; they are administered by the control station via a private back-end network. All administration is done through a Java-based graphical web interface, running on the control station, or through an SSH or telnet connection to the control station. This enhances the Celerra's security by effectively separating the administrative interface (control station) from the X-Blades, thus making it harder to exploit any security flaws in the DART OS and gain unauthorized access to the hosted data. The Celerra uses an external anti-virus server to check the Data Movers files, to prevent performance degradation normally associated with using an anti-virus product on a busy file server. The Celerra Anti-virus Agent server (CAVA) fulfills this role by securing a tunnel between the X-Blade and the anti-virus server.