Dave Graham has posted a blog titled : Refreshing Celerra: New Models + New Features
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EMC has refreshed the Celerra line a bit. With today’s announcement, we’ve added the following hardware models to the fold:
- NS-480 with 2 or 4 datamovers
- NS-960 with support for up to 960 drives
- NS-G8 with support for up to 8 datamovers and connectivity to Symmetrix & CLARiiON systems
Now that that’s been covered, let’s cover some of the other details across the line…
Here’s what the Celerra line-up looks like today:
- The Celerra NS-G8 gateway platform supports up to eight X-Blades, connecting to both CLARiiON and Symmetrix storage arrays. The NS-G8 replaces the Celerra NS80G and the Celerra NSX. The NS-G8 provides both performance and capacity scaling—up to 128 TB of usable IP storage per X-Blade.
- The Celerra NS-960 unified storage platform incorporates up to eight X-Blades with a fully integrated back-end CLARiiON CX4-960 storage array. The NS-960 replaces the Celerra NS80 and provides the highest capacity scaling—up to 128 TB usable IP storage per X-Blade.
- The Celerra NS-480 unified storage platform integrates the CLARiiON CX4-480 array with two or four X-Blades and replaces the Celerra NS40. The Celerra NS-480 scales to 480 drives, and up to 64 TB of usable IP storage per X-Blade.
- The Celerra NS-120 unified storage platform integrates the CLARiiON CX4-120 array with one or two X-Blades and replaces the Celerra NS20. The Celerra NS-120 scales to 120 drives, and up to 32 TB of usable IP storage per X-Blade.
Yes, that’s straight from the press-release but I didn’t feel like coming up with another reinventing of the product lineup. You’ll also be able to use EMC’s EFD (enterprise flash drives) with these Celerra products (sorry, not on the NX4) for even faster NFS/CIFS storage! (I’d point out that it’d be more beneficial on iSCSI or Fibre Channel but who doesn’t want a screamingly fast CIFS share? 
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A couple of cool things to note, however, on the software side:
Compliance:
- Celerra File-Level Retention has a new Compliance option that fully meets SEC Rule 17a-4(f).
General DART features:
- Celerra data deduplication
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008 iSCSI and CIFS (SMB2) support
- Windows Identity Management for UNIX (IdMU)
One thing that’s key is the addition of Celerra data deduplication. With the maintenance release to DART 5.6, any customer on a Celerra NS-500/700, NS-20/40/80, and NX4 will be able to add file-level deduplication to their box provided they’re under current maintenance. Oh, and did I mention it’s FREE? (as in, no extra charge) Last I heard, another specific vendor still charged for that feature…oh, and if you’re using Avamar or EDL products from EMC, you can avoid the re-inflation process for backing your data up…Celerra can transfer that over with no penalty. Very cool stuff!
A couple of hooks that you’ll see coming down the road are a vCenter plug-in to help with VDI deployments on the Celerra. While free, it’s important to note that this is supported by EMC Celerra Engineering, so, while it’s cool to play around with, it probably should be relegated to test/dev for now. I’d honestly recommend using VMware’s View Composer to do your VDI deployments but, it’s nice to know that the capability exists elsewhere.
I’ll leave you with some more release information below. As always, hit me up for questions as you have them!!!
- Next-generation Celerra platforms with CLARiiON CX4 technology deliver up to twice the capacity of the previous generation (up to 960 disks).
- Low power SATA II drives give customers new levels of energy efficiency.
- Enterprise Flash drives deliver Tier 0 storage, with 30 times more IOPS than 15K drives.
- Celerra file system deduplication with compression, included at no additional cost, delivers maximum storage efficiency for primary and archived file systems.
- Celerra unified storage connectivity includes low-cost NAS and iSCSI connectivity, plus high-throughput Fibre Channel and Multi-Path File System (MPFS) access.
- Celerra File-Level Retention now includes a compliance option for file system archiving.
- Celerra Startup Assistant’s Celerra Provisioning Wizard extends the easy Celerra setup to include storage provisioning.
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I thought this was good to know, and I wanted to share his post.
Please view the full post Here http://flickerdown.com/2009/02/refreshing-celerra-new-models-new-features/
