Dell/EMC CX4-960

The CX4-960 offers massive scalability in capacity and performance for customers with large storage requirements. It is ideal for very heavy transaction processing including maximum speed large block data transfers, backup-to-disk, audio/video streaming, replication, data warehousing and highly compute-intensive applications, such as seismic data analysis, computational chemistry, genomic sequencing.

Supports up to 960 Hard Drives Stores up to 1.9PB of data Customized connectivity with up to 4096 hosts in a SAN and 12 I/O slots All of these connectivity options are available on the same array: 8Gbit Fibre Channel (FC), 4Gbit FC, 10Gbit iSCSI, and 1Gbit iSCSI

UltraFlex^TM  modular I/O technology enables you to easily add more ports to your array, either Fibre Channel (FC) or iSCSI, as your needs change. You can also easily add future network technologies, such as FCoE once it is available, giving you remarkable flexibility and investment protection. The innovations built into the new Dell/EMC CX4 arrays extend beyond just flexible I/O to include virtual provisioning, support for enterprise flash drives (EFD), enhanced tiering options, features, such as drive spin down and variable speed fans, that enable greener storage by helping to reduce power consumption, and design improvements for performance and availability. In addition, management and reporting features on the CX4 have been enhanced to help you reduce time and effort required for managing your storage in virtualized server environments.

Employ virtual provisioning to help reduce acquisition and operational costs while helping to improve capacity utilization. This can result in fewer drives and can help reduce hardware costs, management time, and power consumption.

The CX4-960 array can scale from 5 to 960 drives, connect to as many as 4096 highly available hosts in a SAN and store up to 1.9PB of data, and the extensive support matrix makes it easy to add storage in heterogeneous environments. The CX4 eases growing pains allowing you to easily add more capacity, whether it is 10K or 15K FC, 7.2K or 5.4K (energy efficient) SATA or flash drives, as your storage needs change. UltraFlex technology enables you to increase the ports on your array through up to 12 hot-pluggable I/O modules. In addition, the new enterprise flash drives (EFD) option adds a new level of performance for critical applications where 1 EFD can equal the performance of up to 30 Fibre Channel drives. With this increase in performance and number of drives, the CX4-960 now extends Dell’s SAN portfolio beyond mid-range enterprise arrays into the high-end.

Innovations built into the new CX4 arrays help to reduce power consumption and cooling requirements.

The new energy efficient 5,400 RPM SATA drives typically consume up to 32% less power* than a standard 7,200 RPM SATA drive letting you select drives that use less power and help meet your access requirements.The addition of these and other drives creates new tiering options enabling you to use more efficient design in managing how and where your data is stored which offers the potential to reduce power and cooling needs. EFD drives, thanks to their higher performance characteristics, can often replace the need for large numbers of spinning drives. Drive spin down comes standard on the CX4, and enables you to easily set policies for your SATA drives in the array to power them down when not in use, helping to reduce power consumption and cooling requirements. Virtual provisioning is designed to reduce the total number of drives needed, and thus help reduce the power and cooling required for your storage solution. The CX4 includes adaptive fan technology where fans spin only at the speed that is needed to keep it cool, potentially further reducing power requirements.

The same applications that provide advanced data protection, data path management, optimization, replication and migration that were available on previous CX series arrays are also supported on the CX4 arrays. These include SnapView^TM , MirrorView^TM , SAN Copy^TM , Replication Manager^TM , PowerPath^TM , Navisphere^®  Analyzer and Navisphere Quality of Service Manager^TM . The array is managed using the powerful and intuitive management interface, Navisphere Manager, which has formed the core of CX array management since its inception.

New to the CX arrays is the addition of Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST). This software is designed to enable more efficient storage resource utilization by analyzing the activity of data on FC drives and identifying volumes that should be moved to flash drives for improved performance or to SATA drives for more cost-effective storage. It then automates the migration of these volumes, enabling you to optimize your tiered storage while eliminating time-consuming manual processes.

With Dell/EMC storage arrays, you can easily deploy, expand, and re-deploy storage. Migrating data seamlessly between different classes of drives and RAID types can help in delivering the optimal combination of performance and availability for your unique needs. And with Virtual LUN technology, data migration takes place dynamically and effortlessly, helping avoid disruption in your environment. Dell/EMC storage arrays support the EMC data replication and migration applications, Mirrorview^TM  and SAN Copy^TM . These optional tools let you remotely mirror data from one array to another to help meet disaster recovery goals or to simply move data across arrays.

iSCSI using traditional 1Gbit IP connections to connect the Dell/EMC CX4 storage array to server hosts is an ideal choice for a remote server environment or limited budgets. The greater bandwidth of 10Gbit iSCSI will be beneficial to customers who are building out new storage infrastructure or who want to consolidate numerous 1Gbit iSCSI hosts to a single 10Gbit connection. With CX4 arrays, you have the flexibility to choose either iSCSI or Fibre Channel connections and how many iSCSI and FC ports you may want now or later.

Dell/EMC storage arrays are integrated into Dell’s Exchange Microsoft^®  Exchange^® , Microsoft SQL Server^® , and Oracle^®  solutions, which offer tested and validated reference architectures to help solve your messaging and database challenges.