CLARiiON

CLARiiON is the product name of a series of disk arrays, which was developed by Data General, and later acquired by EMC. Worldwide, about 200,000 systems were installed. The CLARiiON series was, as well Celerra, in early 2011 replaced by the new so-called unified platform EMC VNX.

History

The beginnings at Data General

In the early 1990s, a disk array, called HADA (High Availablity Disk Array ) was developed at Data General, which had some interesting technical innovations, which were patented in 1994. The hard drives were replaced during operation ( Hot - Swap), ensuring the electrical contacts carried by runners, who held the components when installing in the correct position and there was a locking mechanism which fixed the inserted disks. The development of Hadas named CLARiiON were equipped with up to 30 SCSI hard drives.

In 1997, the then-common SCSI was replaced by the new Fibre Channel protocol, the first CLARiiON this series ( FC5000 ) was able to double through the use of this new technology, the speed over that time SCSI arrays, the CLARiiON FC4700 was a bestseller.

Development at EMC

The technology of the CLARiiON line was the main reason for EMC, Data General buy 1999. 2002, the first revised series of EMC was put on the market ( CX200, CX400, CX600 ), 2003, the second series ( CX300, CX500, CX700 ), 2006, the CX3 - line ( CX3 -20, CX3 -40, CX3 -80). In 2008, the CX4 was introduced with further improvements mainly in performance and power consumption. In addition, a low-cost variant was developed with the AX line. Models that provide the space over iSCSI, Fibre Channel instead available since mid-2005 were available ( CX300i, CX500i, AX150i ). From the EMC Celerra NAS platform were among models available with built-in memory. These different CLARiiON variants were depending on the model used. The Celerra and CLARiiON product lines were replaced by EMC in early 2011 together with the new VNX platform.

Other Model Numbers

The EMC Clariion series was for some years also marketed by Fujitsu under the name " FibreCAT " and by DELL under the OEM name "AX ".

Hardware

A CLARiiON consists of two storage processors ( SP) and the disk shelves, called Drive Array Enclosures (DAE ). The SPs include in addition to the host bus adapters for connection to the SAN and the DAEs a cache battery-backed power supplies and network card to connect to the LAN. If one SP fails, the other takes over its tasks.

Software

The operating system running on the SPs is called FLARE. CLARiiON is administrated via Navisphere, which is loaded as a Java applet from the embedded Web server SP. On the computers that access the CLARiiON, Navisphere Agent should be installed that communicates over the LAN with the SP. As of version FLARE 30 instead of Navisphere Unisphere now available. The associated command-line tool called navicli naviseccli since FLARE 19. This is an automatic login to the disk array is possible by means of certificates.