The imminent launch of the boxes has been an open secret for several weeks now, and EMC itself has already said that this has been making customers hold back from high-end Clariion purchases.

Possibly more importantly, the boxes are the first Clariions to support the latest 4Gbit version of Fibre Channel, and so neutralize what may have been a big sales advantage for Engenio and its OEM partners, most notably IBM Corp.

During 2005, IBM was the second fastest growing top-five supplier in the external disk array market, according to IDC, which credited IBM with 24% year-on-year revenue growth. The contradictory evidence to that is that the fastest growing top five supplier was Dell Inc, with 37% growth and the bulk of Dell disk sales are of re-badged Clariions.

The last major rework to the Clariion was in 2004, when EMC introduced the CX naming for the boxes. The boxes launched today have been dubbed CX3, because EMC is describing them as third-generation Clariions. Alongside software improvements and the introduction of yet more features copied from the high-end, the most outstanding feature of the boxes is their 4GFC support, from disk drives through internal pipes to front-end ports. EMC is claiming that it is the first vendor to offer this end-to-end 4GFC support.

The mid-range arrays that Engenio Information Technologies Inc and its OEM partners IBM, Sun Microsystems Inc, and SGI, have been shipping since last year only feature 4GFC pipes and ports, not disk drives. But that will change very soon as Engenio and its friends pick up the same Seagate and Hitachi 15,000rpm 73GB and 146GB 4GFC disk drives that EMC is using.

In any case EMC, Engenio and IBM all agree that it is the 4GFC pipes and ports that do most to boost performance. The disk drives have less effect because there are hundreds of them behind the pipes and the ports.

How much the performance difference would be is really hard to tell, but EMC impressed me by waiting until all the 4GFC bits are out there, and not just bringing out a sub-optimal box early so that it could shout about 4GFC support, said Arun Taneja, analyst at the Taneja Group. Those 4GFC pieces needed to make it worthwhile included HBAs only very recently available – and SAN switches, he said.

Taneja said he was also impressed by the management and installation software upgrades that accompany the Clariions, alongside the ability for customers or integrators or resellers to change disks, PSUs, and cooling fans themselves. Until now, this has only been allowed under warranty by EMC engineers.

EMC said the advantage of this to customers is not in cost savings, as the cost of previous Clariions has included three-year all in service-deals. Instead it will be in flexibility, and speed of repair when components need replacing. In the third quarter, this self-service capability will be extended to upgrades for the Clariion’s Flare OS.

In three months’ time EMC will begin offering an ability to upgrade Clariions with data in-place, using its virtual LUN software.

The news CX3 models that are shipping now and will replace the existing Clariion CX300, CX 500, CX700 models are the CX3-20, CX3-40, and CX3-80. So no CX-x50 naming as had been rumored. That’s the numbering that Netapp use. Why we would do that? said EMC marketing director Barry Ader. And the Sledgehammer code-name? That only applied to the CX3-80, according to sources.

CX3-80 handles up to 480 drives, for 239TB maximum capacity, with 16GB cache. For the CX-40 the numbers are 240 drive , 119TB, and 8GB, and for the CX-20 120 drives, 39TB, and 4GB.

The new boxes introduce a PCI-Express bus, and several PCI-X bridges have been eliminated to reduce mirrored cache latency. What was n+1 redundancy for PSUs and fans has been extended for n+1+1 via an option for a second stand-by PSU or fan.

A light on the front of the CX3 boxes shows whether they are running 2GFC or 4GFC drives, reducing chance of mixing 2GFC and 4GFC on same loop. A 2GFC drive fitted to a 4GFC loop would be de-activated, EMC said. The -40 and 80 models will support support 4GFC and 2GFC loops simultaneously.