Dell/EMC CX4-240

High performance storage with connectivity flexibility

The CX4-240 offers remarkable flexibility and investment protection and increased connectivity options and capacity over the CX4-120. It is ideal for heavy transaction processing such as high speed large block data transfers, backup-to-disk, audio/video streaming, replication and departmental applications.

* Supports up to 240 Hard Drives
* Stores up to 234TB of data
* Customized connectivity with up to 512 hosts in a SAN and 8 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



UltraFlexTM 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.
Virtual provisioning

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.
Innovation
Cost effective scalability



Cost effective scalability


The CX4-240 array can scale from 5 to 240 drives, connect to as many as 512 highly available hosts in a SAN and store up to 234TB of data, and the extensive support matrix makes it easy to add storage in heterogeneous environments. The CX4 helps ease 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 8 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 up to the performance of 30 Fibre Channel drives. Plus, if you outgrow your CX4-240, data-in-place upgrades are available to move up to an array with higher capacity and performance within the CX4 family.

Green storage

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 power1 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.


Systems and data management



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 SnapViewTM , MirrorViewTM , SAN CopyTM , Replication ManagerTM , PowerPathTM , Navisphere® Analyzer and Navisphere Quality of Service ManagerTM . 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.
Seamless integration

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, MirrorviewTM and SAN CopyTM . 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 Support


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.
Solutions

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