EMC announced yesterday a new higher-density configuration of its Clariion CX4 midrange storage array and Celerra NAS gateway device, offering twice the capacity of previous systems in half the floor space. The Celerra NAS gateway uses the Clariion frame as its back-end.
The mid-range storage systems, which now can house twice the number of hard disk drives in half the frame space, will also support lower-power 2TB SATA drives, compared to the 1TB drives supported by earlier systems.
The higher-density Clariion can be configured with the 2TB SATA drives as well as high-performance enterprise SSDs. The Clariion uses power efficiency technology such as disk spin down and EMC fully automated storage tiering (FAST) to allow for automated data migration between internal disks. Disk spin down puts drives into sleep mode when they're not in use.
A Clariion array can support up to 480 drives, or 960TB of raw capacity.
The higher density is achieved through a re-architecture of the frame, making it five inches deeper and so that two disk drive trays now fit front to back.