EMC Corp. has filled out its Clarrion CX3 UltraScale line with a low-end model that includes both iSCSI and Fibre Channel connectivity.
Aimed at mid-sized organizations, the CX3-10 can scale up to 30Tb of capacity with 4Gb per second drive interfaces.
Announced today, the model is similar to the CX300, but it comes in separate iSCSI and Fibre Channel versions. Peter Koliopoulos, EMC’s vice-president of global channel marketing, said the fact that the CX3-10 includes both standards will be a big selling point for partners.
A customer can start off with an iSCSI array and, if the applications warrant, switch up to the faster Fiber Channel connection within the same array.
“Either way the customer wants to go he’s got protection,” said Koliopoulos.
Greg Onoprijenko, managing director of sales for E-Ternity, a Mississauga, Ont., EMC partner, agreed. The two-year old company, with annual sales of about $1.5 million, specializes in disaster recovery and business continuity.
The CX3-10 “brings mid-level functionality at an entry-level price,” he said. “It will really open doors for us. It will allow us to produce high-availability solutions in a cost-effective manner.”
The CX3-10 starts at US$27,000 and comes with five disk drives.
Warren Shiau, an industry analyst with the Strategic Counsel of Toronto, said EMC had to add this unit to its line because the cost of direct attached storage keeps dropping. If EMC wants customers to switch to network attached storage, he said, it has to have a competitive offering in this niche.
Advantages of switching to networked storage include manageability, flexibility and speed of accessing data, he said.
Competitors in the mid-tier space include IBM and Network Appliance – who have formed a partnership so IBM can sell NetApp units – and Hewlett-Packard.
Koliopoulos said the CX3-10 should appeal to organizations undergoing their first server and storage consolidations.
It will handle up to 64 hosts, and comes equipped with four iSCSI and four Fibre Channel ports. It comes with EMC’s Navisphere management software.
The company also announced a new version of its replication software that is made strictly for Windows environments. RecoverPoint/SE, which runs on a RecoverPoint appliance, is designed for remote data protection between any two Clariion CX or CX3 UltraScale systems. However, it is limited to replicating only 4TB of data.
Like the versions for other operating systems, the SE software allows customers to define policies to manage data recovery from a single interface. There’s also an optional module that offers bandwidth compression that can give transmission savings for customers with a wide area network
EMC gained the RecoverPoint products with its purchase last year of Kashya.
A RecoverPoint SE solution, including two licences and four server appliances, will cost US$64,000.
Finally, the company also announced two free guides for authorized services partners to help with installation and fine-tuning of its storage products. Koliopoulos said these help deliver on EMC’s promise to aid its VARs to deliver more services.
The Clariion Interactive Installation Guide is a set of software tools that helps partners set up logical units, permissions and arrays through a series of wizards.
“A partner can tag on additional implementation services around this offering,” Koliopoulos said.
The Clariion Disk Replacement Utility is a routine that scans EMC arrays and warns if disks are near failure. This should cut down on the time partners spend on diagnostics, Koliopoulos said.
Also released were a set of reference architectures with best of breed recommendations for setting up Microsoft Exchange 2003, SQL Server 2007 and Oracle RAC 10g on EMC arrays.
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