EMC claims double boost for Clariion

A new "breakthrough in midrange storage performance, scalability and economics" is EMC's claim for UltraScale — its latest design for the Clariion CX3 range — which it launched on Monday.

The move continues EMC's efforts to move into, and dominate, the SME market —  a territory it had until earlier this year ignored.

EMC launched three new CX3 arrays based on the UltraScale architecture, which it claims offer information lifecycle management (ILM) at a cost affordable to small businesses.

The entry-level Clariion CX3-20 is aimed at mail/messaging, departmental applications and databases, Web services and distributed applications and supports both high-performance and high-capacity disk drives in the same system. It can scale to 59TB, with an entry-level system offering 365GB of storage for £14,650 ($27,000).

The CX3-40 can support 2Gbps Fibre Channel (FC) drives and 2Gbs and 4Gbs FC drives in the same system. It scales up to 119TB.

The CX3-80 can support 2Gbps and 4Gbps FC disk drives in the same system and scale up to 239TB.

While the world is starting to embrace iSCSI, EMC does not have iSCSI yet for the CX3 series but promises support, later this year. EMC claims that it has "45 patents pending" on the UltraScale architecture and that it is the first with "full end-to-end, 4Gbps FC technology."

 "UltraScale architecture was specifically designed to deliver the industry’s best performance, throughput and scalability — eliminating the bottlenecks customers face with other midrange systems.  It also delivers the best economics – allowing customers to consolidate application tiers onto a single array, leverage their existing software and training investments and mix-and-match the latest disk drive technology to meet their business needs,"said David Donatelli, EMC vice-president for storage platforms.

UltraScale architecture can be configured for direct-attach and SAN deployments, the company said.