EMC Doubles Midrange Storage Capacity

EMC has introduced a midrange storage array that the company said provides twice the capacity of previous systems in half the data center space.

The EMC CLARiiON CX4 is available with up to a total of 390 2TB 5,400 RPM and 7,200 RPM SATA drives. Customers who need to consolidate storage from multiple applications and file servers may deploy EMC's new Celerra NAS Gateway, which supports NFS, CIFS and iSCSI protocols.

The storage system offers configurations that double the storage capacity in half the floor space, according to EMC. For customer looking for more storage and higher energy efficiency, EMC's 2 TB 5,400 RPM SATA drives consume 60% less power per gigabyte than a 1 TB 7,200 RPM SATA drive.

The CLARiiON CX4 also support solid state drives, for companies that need to add SSDs to provide faster performance to some applications. The system includes EMC's fully automated storage tiering, or FAST, technology that automates the movement of data on expensive flash drives and inexpensive SATA disk drives in mixed storage environments. EMC launched FAST in December.

The system includes EMC's spin-down technology, which power down inactive drives, saving up to 65% of the energy required by traditional spinning SATA drives, EMC said.

EMC's CLARiiON CX4 provides access to all disk drives from the front of the storage system's rack. The slide-out design enables the front enclosures to be moved forward, providing access to enclosures and drives.

The CLARiiON CX4 and the Celerra NAS Gateway were introduced on Tuesday. Pricing was not disclosed.