Irreverence

posted on 29 July 2008 20:02

Hot after these speculations comes new CX4 information. I don't know if this is all true but here are some details supposedly of EMC's new CX4, the 4th generation CLARiiON mid-range storage product. They come from various sources of unknown provenance which conflict in some details. So take these details with the proverbial a pinch of salt:-

1. There are four models: CX4-120; CX4-240; CX4-480; and CX4-960, with the numbers after the hyphen being the number of drives supported.

2. The system has an UltraFlex I/O architecture in which there are four modules which contain either 1Gbit/s iSCSI or 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel (FC) or 8Gbit/s FC. By changing the module you change the CX4's personality from iSCSI to Fibre Channel or vice versa. There can be up to four flex I/O modules in a CX4-960 product. There is a slot put aside for FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet). Future I/O support could include InfiniBand. The I/O modules are hot-pluggable.

They are placed horizontally in the CX4-960 and vertically in the other models.

3. Flash solid state drives (SSD) are available for tier 0 storage on high-end CX4s, the -480 and -960 models, as with Symmetrix. (If a flash drive is in the same form factor as with the hard drives then there can be 15 of them in a DAE - see below - and we might suppose 15 x 64GB = 960GB flash.)

3. Energy Smart drive destage is offered to increase energy efficiency. It works by staging or destaging drives, spinning them down, according to the I/O load. (This is fuzzy to me. My guess is to concentrate on spin-down with 'drive destage' being a term EMC won't use.)

4. RecoverPoint, for concurrent local and remote replication is enabled in Flare, the CLARiiON 64-bit O/S

5. CX4 systems are built up from (a) a 4U (-960) Storage Processor Enclosure (SPE) which houses the storage processor, power supplies, fans and I/O modules, and (b) an UltraPoint disk array enclosure (DAE) housing up to 15 drives in 3U. A CX4-120 can have 8 DAEs, a CX4-240 16, a CX4-480 32 and a CX4-960 64 DAEs.

Picture

A CX4-960 SPE with the lid off showing the four Ultraflex I/O modules at the front (right-hand side). These slide out to enable individual I/O modules to be installed or replaced. The two quad-core Xeons are on the left-hand side.

- Note 1. there can be dual standby power supplies in a 2U SPS enclosure.

- Note 2. The storage processors are hot-swappable with up to 16GB of memory per SP. All CX4 models have two SPs.

- Note 3. The CX4-120 has a single dual-core Xeon CPU operating at 1.2GHz; The CX4-240 ditto but at 1.6GHz; the CX4-480 ditto but at 2.2GHZ; and the CX4-960 2 quad-core Xeon CPUs running at 2.33GHz. RAM is 3, 4, 8 and 16GB respectively. One source says cache is 600MB, 1.264GB, 4.5GB and 10.764GB respectively. nother says its 6. 8, 16 and 32GB respectively.

- Note 4. Each CX4-960 SP connects to at least eight 4Gbit/s FC front-end ports and at leat two 1Gbit/s iSCSI front end ports. Each SP also connects to four or eight 4Gbits FC back end ports for disk connectivity and capacity expansion.

- Note 5. Think of the CX4-120 as a part rack, the CX4-240 as a full rack, the CX4-480 as twin racks, and the CX4-960 as three racks.

6. The CX4 can be a direct-attached storage array or a SAN-attached one via iSCSI or FC.

7. RAID levels 0, 1, 1/0, 3, 5 and 6 are supported. There is global hot-sparing and an online upgrade capability, also data-in-place upgrades.

8. The drive range is from a minimum of five drives to the full 960.

9. Attached server O/S support includes Windows, Solaris, Linux, AIX, HP-UX and VMware for both FC and iSCSI.

10. The CX4 detects the characteristics of drives as they are added.

11. A base LUN can be expanded in size to create a metaLUN which is a combination of more than one LUN joined together by striping or concatenation. Virtual LUN technology enables data to be migrated from a source LUN or metaLUN to another LUN or metaLUN in the storage system without disrupting a host application.

12. Supported disk drives include 146, 300 and 450GB 15,000rpm 4Gbit/s FC, 400GB 4Gbit/s 10,000rpm FC, and low-power, 1TB 4Gbit/s 7,200rpm and 5,400rpm SATA II. There is no SAS drive support. The CX4-480 and CX4-960 can have flash drives (SSD).

13.The CX4-480 and CX4-960 support 8Gbit/s FC ports.

14. The CX4 supports thin provisioning.

15. The channel could order CX4s from July 21st with first deliveries in August.

16. The CX4 has twice the application performance of the CX3 and double its scalability.

On previous occasions when asked to comment on new product rumours EMC has refused to do so. The company has been asked if it wishes to comment on this one and, as expected, has said: "No comment."

^{[Chris Mellor.]}