History
The Clariion disk array project started in the early 1990s when Tom West (the protagonist of the Pulitzer Prize winning book The Soul of a New Machine) convinced Data General to develop the array. West realized the potential for more advanced and openly compatible data-storage devices, as did competitors such as Digital Equipment Corporation with their StorageWorks product.
Patented in 1994, the Clariion disk array had some interesting features that later became standard in the data-storage and computing industry. Features mentioned in the patent paperwork included optional hot swapping, guide rails for proper electrical contact, and a method to lock the drives in place once they were secured in the disk enclosure. Other notable features include industry's first dual active-controller design, mirrored write cache, full system redundancy and hot repair.
The Clariion line was soon extended to contain SCSI disk arrays ranging from 7 to 30 slots. In 1997, Data General's Clariion division took the unusual step of adopting an emerging standard — Fibre Channel. The FC5000 array utilized a Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop connection that doubled the performance of SCSI arrays at that time. It was also the first to use RAID level 5 on Fibre Channel drives.
From there, the Clariion range grew into a faster, more expandable midrange storage platform, culminating in the FC5700 under Data General. After EMC's acquisition of Data General, significant development of a new range of Clariion arrays took place, resulting in the FC4500 and FC4700.
Within a couple of years, the first CX series of Clariions (CX200, CX400 and CX600) was developed. Subsequent processor and bandwidth upgrades led to a new CX lineup (CX300, CX500, CX700) and a low end SATA based Clariion array, the AX100 (now updated to AX150). In 2003, Clariion became the industry's first NEBS-certified storage system.
In May 2006, EMC introduced the third generation of Clariion, named CX3 UltraScale. The lineup, consisting of the CX3-20, CX3-40 and CX3-80, was the industry's only storage platform to leverage end-to-end 4 Gbit/s (4 billion bits per second) Fibre Channel and PCI-Express technologies. Later in 2007, the line was expanded to include a new entry-level storage system, the CX3-10.
Most newer Clariion models up to the CX3 run a version of Windows XP Embedded.
Read more about this topic: Clariion
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