Clariion call

I have this recurring dream where a promising storage start-up whose products I have reviewed or analyzed ends up being purchased by a big guy. Only it’s not a dream but a common reality in this ultra-competitive storage market. Vendors are constantly trying to differentiate their offerings with promising implementations of new technologies…and it’s often easier for the large vendors to acquire a technology than develop it in-house.

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Unsurprisingly, one of such post-acquisition news tidbits comes from EMC and its storage partner, Dell. Both vendors are announcing this week a new Clariion model and simultaneously disclosing RecoverPoint/SE, which is, I believe, a first offering of Kashya’s recovery software integrated with EMC’s. I knew from previous reporting that EMC was going to merge Kashya’s technology (obtained through one of EMC’s many acquisitions) with its RecoverPoint applications, but I didn’t know when. Looks like that question has now been answered.

Why is Kashya important? Because it’s a well-focused data recovery solution firmly entrenched with popular databases from Microsoft and Oracle, not to mention Exchange. One of the latest versions of its software, released just before the merger with EMC, added the very useful capability of seamless testing application recovery with little or no downtime.

As for the new Clariion CX-310, it shares the same management tools as other models in the same line, including Navisphere and PowerPath. The CX-310 has less capacity and less scalability but otherwise maintains the same hardware architecture as other models, with both iSCSI and 4G FC connectivity and support for SATA (serial ATA) and FC (Fibre Channel) drives.

If you’ve been following announcements from other storage vendors in the same space, you may notice a trend toward SAS (serial attached SCSI) drives, a technology that according to many analysts will in time replace FC drives. EMC, however, seems happy to continue offering the FC-SATA drive combination for its Clariion — at least for now.

Is this difference a big deal? Probably not. I am sure that at some point EMC will start deploying SAS in its arrays. However, it’s an interesting indication of different priorities with EMC perhaps feeling more urgency to put its large portfolio of software acquisitions to work rather than refreshing its products with new hardware technologies.

I don’t have many details for now on how RecoverPoint/SE works, but according to EMC, it should provide a variety of recovery intervals to remotely connected Windows servers for up to 4TB of data stored on Clariion arrays. Knowing that the option exists, I am tempted to find out more. If RecoverPoint/SE lives up to its promises, it could be an easy-to-deploy disaster recovery solution that’s worth exploring, regardless of what kind of disk drives or what size storage array you have to buy.

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