CLARiiON
CLARiiON is the product name of a series of disk arrays developed by Data General and later acquired by EMC . Around 200,000 systems have been installed worldwide.
Like Celerra , the CLARiiON series was replaced at the beginning of 2011 by the new so-called unified platform EMC VNX .
history
The beginnings at Data General
At the beginning of the 1990s, Data General developed a disk array called HADA (High Availability Disk Array) , which had some interesting technical innovations that were patented in 1994. The hard disks could be exchanged during operation ( hot-swap ), the electrical contacts were secured by sliding rails that held the components in the correct position during installation and there was a locking mechanism that fixed the inserted hard disks. The further development of the HADAs with the name CLARiiON could be equipped with up to 30 SCSI hard drives.
In 1997, the then common SCSI was replaced by the new Fiber Channel protocol, the first CLARiiON of this series (FC5000) was able to double the speed compared to the SCSI arrays of the time thanks to the use of this new technology, the CLARiiON FC4700 became a bestseller.
Further development at EMC
CLARiiON line technology was the primary reason EMC bought Data General in 1999. In 2002 the first revised series was launched by EMC (CX200, CX400, CX600), in 2003 the second series (CX300, CX500, CX700), in 2006 the CX3 line (CX3-20, CX3-40, CX3-80) . In 2008 the CX4 was introduced with further improvements, especially in terms of performance and power consumption. In addition, a low-cost variant was developed with the AX line. Models that provide storage space via iSCSi instead of Fiber Channel have been available since mid-2005 (CX300i, CX500i, AX150i).
From the EMC NAS platform Celerra were available models with integrated storage. Different CLARiiON variants were used depending on the model.
The Celerra and CLARiiON product lines were jointly replaced by EMC in early 2011 with the new VNX platform.
Other model names
The EMC-Clariion series was also marketed by Fujitsu under the name "FibreCAT" and by DELL under the OEM name "AX" for a number of years.
hardware
A CLARiiON consists of two storage processors (SP) and the hard disk shelves, called Drive Array Enclosures (DAE). In addition to the host bus adapters for connection to the SAN and the DAEs, the SPs contain a cache, battery-buffered power supply units and a network card for connection to the LAN . If one SP fails, the other takes over its tasks.
software
The operating system that runs on the SPs is called FLARE . The CLARiiON is administered via Navisphere , which is loaded as a Java applet from the integrated web server of the SP. The Navisphere Agent , which communicates with the SP via LAN , should be installed on the computers that access the CLARiiON . As of version FLARE 30, Unisphere is now available instead of Navisphere . The associated command line tool has been called navicli since FLARE 19 naviseccli . This enables an automatic login to the disk array using certificates.