March EMC and Dell Computers jointly announced enhancements to the CLARiiON software management suite. Announced were enhancements to Navisphere, EMC MirrorView and EMC SnapView software products. Additionally, incremental platform enhancements were made to the FC4700 and FC4500 distributed arrays. These included support for 181GB disk drives, server platform support, SAN Boot capabilities and Cluster support.
Announcement highlights
EMC and Dell Computers made their first joint announcement concerning the CLARiiON distributed product family since the announcement of their strategic agreement to co-brand EMC's CLARiiON storage arrays and management software. Announced was the Navisphere 6.0 Management Suite featuring a browser-based GUI and enhanced security features. The browser support will allow management of the CLARiiON FC4700 from any remote location via the Web. Security features include SSL Encryption and an Audit Log. Access to the FC4700 CLARiiON management functions are determined by user role. A "Monitor" role will allow the viewing of the array but cannot perform any management tasks. A "Manager" role can monitor and perform all array configurations. The "Administrator" role allows all Manager privileges plus can create, delete, and change user accounts.
The MirrorView (peer-to-peer Remote Copy) product has been enhanced to allow a source CLARiiON to mirror up to two target CLARiiON subsystems or mirror up to four primary sites to a single secondary site.
MirrorView enhancements
- Capability to mirror up to 4 primary sites to a single secondary site
- Up to 50 total LUNs involved in mirror per FC4700
- Up to 25 total mirrored LUNs per FC4700 with optional Write Intent Log
- Single source mirroring to two target arrays
The SnapView (PIT Copy) was enhanced to allow up to eight active snapshots per LUN. The snapshots can be taken at the same time or incrementally throughout the day.
SnapView enhancements
- Up to eight active snapshots can be created per LUN
- Snapshots can be taken at the same time or incrementally
- Enables multiple uses for Snapshots concurrently
EMC/Dell also announced the following enhancements to the FC4500 and FC4700 arrays:
- 181GB, 7,200 rpm disk drive support
- SAN Boot (Dell, Netware, HP-UX)
- Cluster Support (W2K/NT VCS, Sun, HP-UX, AIX, Netware)
- Server Support (Sun, HP-UX)
Evaluator Group comments:
The enhancements to MirrorView and SnapView are excellent additions to the CLARiiON software family. These enhancements were expected and it should be reassuring to customers that EMC and CLARiiON are enhancing the CLARiiON family. The MirrorView still lacks an extended distance option but we expect Dell/EMC to add this in the near future. The CLARiiON family is a welcome addition to Dell's storage products making them very competitive with Compaq.
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