EMC CX3-10 / CX3-10c Disk Storage Array

Description

EMC CX3-10 / CX3-10c Storage Array

The EMC CX3-10 brings you a cost-effective entry point to the advanced capabilities of the CX3 UltraScale series of networked storage systems. The EMC CX3-10 is ideal for departmental applications or midsize organizations that need a scalable networked storage solution to consolidate storage.

The CX3-10 starts at 365 GB and scales up to 60TB of capacity. You get the price/performance and five 9s availability (99.999 percent) that your growing business needs at an affordable price. Advanced functionality protects your data and wizard-driven software capabilities make daily management easy.

Deploy flexibly with four 4 Gbps Fibre Channel and four 1 Gbps iSCSI host ports.

EMC CX3-10 / CX3-10c Pricing

SPS Pros sells used/refurbished and fully-tested EMC storage arrays to help your company meet its storage needs at the best prices available. If you need something you don’t see listed as an option, please use the contact us page and we’ll help you get what you need.

CX3-10 / CX3-10c Major Subassemblies

The minimum CX3-10 / CX3-10c assembly consists of a single 1U storage processor enclosure (SPE), a 1U standby power supply (SPS), and a 3U 4Gbps UltraPoint disk-array enclosure (DAE), for a total of 5U. A fully configured CX3-10 / CX3-10c consists of the SPE and dual SPS, plus four 3U-DAEs, for a total of 14U. Minimum and maximum configurations of the CX3-10 / CX3-10c assembly are shown below in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Minimum and Maximum CX3-10 / CX3-10c Configurations

The dual SPS, SPE, and DAE assemblies are rackmounted for efficiency, and provide the user with many different configuration options. The CLARiiON 40U cabinet (with industry-standard 19-inch racks) can house different configurations of the CX3-10 / CX3-10c systems, as well as 1, 2, or 4Gbps Fibre Channel switches (1U and/or 2U) and/or Ethernet network switches. The standard 40U cabinet comes with four power distribution units (PDUs) and four power distribution panels (PDPs). Power supplies on the left side of the cabinet use the left PDU; power supplies on the right use the right PDU. Additionally, all CLARiiON storage systems can be installed in non-EMC industry-standard cabinets.

CX3-10 / CX3-10c Storage Processor

Each CX3-10 / CX3-10c Storage Processor (SP) contains one 1.8Ghz 1MB L2 cache Intel Xeon processor. This dual-storage processor architecture provides the power for enhanced performance, stability, and reliability in the CX3-10 / CX3-10c storage system. Each CX1-20 / CX3-10c SP has 1GB of system memory. There is a PCI Express-x4 CMI channel between the storage processors that is used for communication and messaging between the storage processors as well for the mirroring of data that is written to the portion of memory that has been designated for write cache on the storage system.

Figure 2. Air Dam of CX3-10 / CX3-10c Storage Processor’s Front-End and Back-End Ports

Figure 2 shows the air dam for the CX3-10 / CX3-10c storage processor. LEDs provide indications of LAN connectivity, SP power, boot prorgess, and fault status, as well as power supply and blower status. The LEDs also indicate the speed at which the front and back-end ports are running – green indicates 2Gbps and blue indicates 4Gbps.

Each CX3-10 / CX3-10c SP has both iSCSI and Fibre Channel front-end ports.

The two 1Gbps iSCSI front-end (FE) ports are copper Ethernet ports. Using Navisphere Manager or CLI, the user can change the settings on each port from autonegotiate to 10/100/1000Mbps. These ports may be connected to a 10/100/1000Mbps port on an Ethernet switch, or they may be directly connected to a 10/100/1000Mbps NIC or iSCSI HBA on a server/host.

The two 4Gbps Fibre Channel front-end ports, which are small-form-factor pluggable (SFP) optical transceivers, are customer-replaceable and have a default setting of auto-negotiate. Using Navisphere Manager or CLI, the user can change the settings from auto-negotiate to 1, 2, or 4Gbps. These front-end ports may be connected to a 1, 2, or 4Gbps transceiver on a switch, or they may be directly connected to a 1, 2, or 4Gbps HBA on a server/host.

Each SP also has one Fibre Channel 4Gbps back-end port, which, along with the peer SP, form one redundant FC back-end loop for disk connectivity and capacity expansion.

The CX3-10 / CX3-10c SP also has two 10/100 LAN ports, one for Management and one for Service, as well as two micro-DB9 communication ports, one for serial communication and one for SPS sensing. The Management port is used to access and manage the storage processor via Navisphere, while the Serivce port is a dedicated port to be used by EMC Certifed Proven Professionals, should the need arise for them to access the storage processor when they are onsite.

Figure 3. CX3-10 / CX3-10c Power Supplies and Cooling

The CX3-10 / CX3-10c SPE uses four 260-watt power supplies supporting N+1 power and N+1 cooling per storage processor. The power supplies contain thermal sensors for Ambient Over-Temperature monitoring. Cooling is achieved through high speed blowers attached to each power supply module.

A single power supply can power a single storage processor and a single blower can cool a single storage processor. Either storage processors can have a single fault and still maintain write caching. The CX3-10 / CX3-10c can run indefinitely with one power supply/blower module faulted or removed on each SP and still maintain high availability (HA).

CX3-10 / CX3-10c Standby Power Supply (SPS)

As shown in Figure 4, the CX3-10 / CX3-10c SPE uses one 1-kilowatt SPS to maintain power to the storage system during a power loss to allow for a full dump of the write cache to a reserved area on persistent disk. An additional SPS can be added for further redundancy

When only one SPS is used in the CX3-10 / CX3-10c, the power output connectors for the SPS supply power to SP A and the first DAE on the first back-end loop. The power for SP B and the remaining power to the first DAE on the first back-end loop are supplied by the PDU within the CLARiiON 40U rack. When two SPSs are used, the power ouput connectors from the additional SPS power both SP B and the first DAE.

Figure 4. View of CX3-10 / CX3-10c Standby Power Supply (SPS)

It is important to cable each SPS so it connects completely to either the A side or the B side. For example, if you are looking at the SPS from the back, they should be configured as follows:

• SPS on the right: Power-out and sense cables should connect to power supply A and SP A.
• SPS on the left: Power-out and sense cables should connect to power supply B and SP B (optional).

If an SPS is cabled with the SPS sense cable going to SP A and the power-out cable going to power supply B (or vice versa), error conditions are displayed when the SPS is tested while it is charging.