The CLARiiON was developed in the early 1990's by Data General Corporation, one of the first minicomputer companies. CLARiiON was an early commercial example of a RAID product and initially sold exclusively as an array with the company's AViiON line of computer systems. Realizing the enormous potential of storage arrays, Data General created a separate CLARiiON division and began selling the product as an OEM offering to its systems competitors. While this somewhat lessened the advantages of AViiON in the marketplace, and was a source of internal corporate friction, it allowed the company to sell higher volumes and popularize the brand. The strategy paid dividends as the company was acquired by EMC in 1999, primarily for the CLARiiON line of products.

History

The CLARiiON disk array was started as a Skunkworks project inside Data General and was one of the first and most successful RAID product families introduced in the history of the computer industry.

Patented in 1994, the CLARiiON disk array had some interesting features that are now standard in the data storage and computing industry. Features mentioned in the patent paperwork included hot swappability, guide rails for proper electrical contact, and a method to lock the drives in place once they were secured in the disk enclosure.

The CLARiiON line quickly spanned from 7 slot SCSI disk arrays, to 30 slot SCSI disk arrays. In 1997, Data General's CLARiiON division took the unusual step of adopting an emerging standard - Fibre Channel. The FC5000 array utilized a Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop connection that doubled the performance of SCSI arrays at that time.

From there, the CLARiiON disk arrays grew into a fast, expandable midrange storage platform culminating in the FC5700 under Data General. After EMC acquired Data General, significant development of a new range of CLARiiON arrays took place with the development of the FC4500 and FC4700. Within a couple of years, the first CX series of CLARiiONs (CX200, CX400 and CX600) were developed. Processor and bandwidth upgrades brought us the CLARiiON line (CX300, CX500, CX700) and a low end SATA based CLARiiON array, the AX100 (now updated to AX150). In May 2006, EMC introduced the 3rd generation CX3 UltraScale series of arrays, consisting of the CX3-20, CX3-40 and CX3-80, the industry's only storage platform to leverage end-to-end 4Gb/s Fibre Channel technology.

EMC CLARiiON Software OVERVIEW

All CLARiiON systems—including the entry-level CLARiiON AX150—are designed to be easy to install, manage, and scale to help you save time, keep costs low and protect customer's investments. The CLARiiON Microcode called FLARE provides all the underlying data availability, reliability and advanced functionality of the CLARiiON system. CLARiiON offers the following RAID options: No RAID (pure disk), RAID-0 (striping), RAID-1 (mirroring), RAID-1/0 (striping with mirroring), RAID-3 (striping with parity), and RAID-5 (striping with distributed parity). Various features exist in addition to basic RAID functionality:

Virtual LUN Migration - CLARiiON provides advanced "in the box" data migration tools. LUNs can be moved between RAID types, and between drive types (FC to SATA for instance), online while hosts are accessing data. This simplifies system reconfiguration and also enables tiering within the array based on application types and performance requirements.

Navisphere Manager (array management) - The Navisphere Management Suite is an easy to use task based wizard driven interface that allows you to manage, discover, monitor, and configure EMC CLARiiON storage systems from a Web browser—for complete storage management anytime, anywhere. The array can also be managed through the NaviCLI, a CLI-based tool which may be useful for scripting purposes. Navisphere Analyzer, also part of the Navisphere storage management software suite collects performance information, archives it, and provides graphing and charting for trend analysis and reporting.

Navisphere Quality of Service Manager (application performance management) - EMC Navisphere Quality of Service Manager is a software product that enables customers to monitor and achieve performance objectives for applications. It lets customers decide which applications get more of the available system resources, which enables them to meet service levels on an application-by-application basis. It is designed with an integrated scheduler, to achieve service levels on the most critical applications in the system at any time. It can also be used to monitor application performance on the array to determine possible bottlenecks.

Replication software- CLARiiON also offers replication software to improve backup and recovery processes; implement disaster recovery solutions to meet a variety of Recovery Point Objectives (RPO); offload production systems; and simplify data mobility/migration operations.
 

EMC CLARiiON Networked Storage Software

Archiving Secure and scalable archiving for cost effective and compliant preservation and repurposing of content.

Celerra FileMover Automates file movement to and from tiered storage platforms—transparently to clients and applications.

Backup and Recovery Fast, reliable backup and recovery of all your data.

EMC RecoverPoint/SE Replicate and protect your EMC CLARiiON CX- or CLARiiON CX3-based information with Continuous Remote Replication (CRR) and Continuous Data Protect (CDP) capabilities.

Replication Manager/SE Simplifies and automates EMC SnapView replications and EMC SAN Copy software in EMC CLARiiON and Microsoft Windows environments for reduced management, maintenance costs—and increased productivity.

SnapView Creates multiple, point-in-time copies of your production data in seconds for faster data backup and recovery—increasing application availability.

Business Continuity and Availability Reduce or eliminate downtime and increase application availability to meet a wide range of business needs.

MirrorView Remote synchronous and asynchronous mirroring options for business continuity protection. MirrorView protects your business and improves productivity by providing highly available data mirroring over any distance. Supports connection over IP networks as well as Fibre Channel.

SAN Copy Data mobility between multi-vendor storage systems over a high-speed SAN infrastructure or WAN.

Resource Management Plan, provision, monitor, and model your information infrastructure to improve service levels and optimize resource utilization.

Navisphere Management Suite Simple, secure, Web-based management from any location. Discover, monitor, configure, and report on multiple CLARiiON arrays from your browser.

Navisphere Quality of Service Manager Measures, monitors, and controls I/O requests from applications enabling you to more effectively manage application service levels. Set performance targets for high-priority applications—and limit low-priority applications on your CLARiiON storage array.

Smarts Storage Insight for Availability Automated root-cause and impact analysis of availability problems across the Fibre Channel SAN.