Dell / EMC CX series storage arrays have built a reputation for performance, ease of use, scalability, flexibility, reliability, and investment protection since their initial launch in 2002. Now in their fourth generation, the CX4 arrays build on that reputation and are designed to greatly increase performance and capacity from the previous generation. The CX4 series provides impressive flexibility and investment protection with the introduction of new UltraFlex technologies as they become available.

The Dell / EMC CX4-960 offers an excellent combination of performance, flexibility, and scalability for users with high availability requirements. It is well suited for demanding OLTP and messaging workloads or other applications that benefit from array-based replication. The adaptability offered with this highly scalable storage array helps protect your company’s bottom line by allowing your storage infrastructure to scale to meet your needs today and tomorrow.

The CX4 series introduces UltraFlex technology that enables the user to customize the network interconnect and number of ports needed to meet current and future storage requirements. The CX4-960 comes standard with Fibre Channel (FC) connectivity. It also comes with either iSCSI or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) ports. It can be easily expanded with additional FC, iSCSI, or FCoE ports for a wide range of flexible storage networking.

The CX4-960 supports up to 960 hard drives and 32GB of system cache, connects to as many as 4096 highly available hosts, and has 12 UltraFlex I/O slots for connectivity customization. In addition, the CX4-960 supports enterprise flash drives (EFD). These drives can provide an extremely high level of performance scalability, giving you more opportunities to address storage needs with a single solution.

Thin provisioning enables the CX4-960 to allocate space only as it is needed by hosts instead of setting up a large pool of storage that goes unused. The result is that fewer drives are required, helping to reduce hardware costs, management time and costs, and power consumption.

Fully automated storage tiering (FAST) seamlessly moves 1GB chunks of data to different disk tiers based on performance requirements. On the CX4-960, flash drives can be used as a “Tier 0” for data with the highest performance requirements. Fibre Channel drives are available in both 10K and 15K rotational speeds as a Tier 1 for the next level of performance. 7.2K RPM SATA drives are available as a Tier 2 for high capacity and lower cost storage needs.

The Dell / EMC CX4-960 delivers several features to help reduce power and cooling costs.

Dell / EMC storage arrays now come with Unisphere, a task based, highly intuitive management interface that controls current and legacy CX environments. This enhancement reduces administrator overhead and improves reliability.

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