New EMC CLARiiON AX4 With iSCSI and FC

The
CLARiiON AX4 system can scale to 60 terabytes of capacity and supports
either iSCSI or Fibre Channel SAN connectivity. With built-in advanced
information management and protection features, it can store, manage
and protect data from up to 64 high availability Windows, Linux, Unix,
NetWare and VMware Infrastructure hosts simultaneously. The CLARiiON
AX4 system, with a starting list price of $8,599, is cost-effective to
deploy, can easily be tailored and expanded to meet dynamic information
storage requirements and is ideally suited for applications including
Microsoft Exchange, SQL, Oracle and SAP. It can be configured with up
to 60 SAS and SATA disk drives for an optimal mix of performance, cost
and energy efficiency.

The CLARiiON AX4
system was specifically designed to integrate with and extend key
VMware Infrastructure capabilities, many of which require shared
storage.  Built-in features enable real-time volume expansion – making
the allocation of high performance storage for new virtual machines
simple and seamless.  The CLARiiON AX4 also includes EMC’s Virtual LUN
technology, which can be used in conjunction with VMware Storage
VMotion, a new product introduced with the recent major upgrade to
VMware Infrastructure, for the non-disruptive migration of multiple
virtual machine disk files.  In addition, the CLARiiON AX4 supports
EMC’s leading replication software, including EMC MirrorView, EMC SAN
Copy, EMC RepliStor and EMC Replication Manager to provide the
highest levels of uptime in VMware environments. The CLARiiON AX4 has
been certified by VMware and will be included in the VMware Storage/SAN
Compatibility Guide.

“Companies, especially
SMBs, are constantly looking for ways to simplify their IT environments
and get the most value from their storage investments,” said Charles
King, Principal Analyst, Pund-IT, Inc. “That’s one of the key reasons
why iSCSI is becoming so popular, and is especially important in VMware
environments where new virtual servers require consolidated storage.
EMC’s CLARiiON AX4 is ideal for SMB’s virtualized environments since it
includes key features that make it easy for businesses with
few or no dedicated IT resources to set-up, manage and allocate
networked storage. With the CLARiiON AX4, EMC is providing customers
plenty of storage options at an attractive price point.”

With
an easy-to-use, intuitive interface, terabytes of SAN capacity can be
configured with just a few mouse clicks by following simple, graphical
interface instructions and installation wizards. System management is
also intuitive and simplified by using the latest version of EMC
Navisphere® Express, which uses a graphical approach to creating and
managing disk pools and virtual disks, enabling storage capacity to be
created, allocated and re-allocated in seconds, while the application
remains online. This builds on EMC’s commitment to delivering storage
systems that are easy to use, manage and deploy.

“We’re
a small, but growing company and need a more sophisticated storage
solution for our server environment,” said Kevin Phoenix, Principal
responsible for Operations and Administration at SwervePoint, LLC, a
communications merchandising firm, which is deploying a CLARiiON AX4 to
support its 24 employees. “We don’t have an IT staff and have run into
limitations with our server-based storage. It was very easy to take the
EMC CLARiiON AX4 and plug it into our existing IP network and to
configure it using the Navisphere Express interface.  We were off and
running with an iSCSI SAN within minutes.  As a growing company, we
also considered what our future needs are going to be and liked the
CLARiiON AX4 system’s flexibility and software features, which are a
little more sophisticated than you’d expect in an entry-level networked
storage system.”

The CLARiiON AX4 includes
features for high availability and reliability that are not typically
found in competitive systems of this size. The CLARiiON AX4 was
specifically designed for SMBs and is built on the same architecture
used in larger, market-leading EMC CLARiiON CX3 midrange storage arrays
which have achieved coveted “Five 9s” availability – 99.999% of
uptime. It features a mirrored cache design, built-in standby power
supply, continuous disk consistency checking and hot swappable
components which provide superior levels of data availability and
reliability.

The new CLARiiON AX4 system will be offered by EMC’s worldwide network of distributors, resellers and channel partners  (Arrow, Avnet, CDW, Ingram Micro, Tech Data, etc).
It will also be offered by Dell and NEC under their own brands. It has
been extensively tested for interoperability with a wide range of host
operating systems, HBAs and SAN infrastructure and clustering
components in EMC’s E-Lab, which provides the most comprehensive
interoperability testing in the industry.

Availability and Price:
The
CLARiiON AX4 system is available immediately through EMC’s worldwide
network of distributors and partners with a starting list price of
$8,599 for a three terabyte configuration.