Wednesday, September 17, 2014

EMC Clariion Architecture and its Features

Clariion Architecture

          Clariion Architecture is based on intelligent Storage Processors that manage physical drives on the back-end and service host requests on the front-end. Depending on the module, each Storage processor includes either one or two CPUs.
        
Storage Processors communicate to each other over the CLARiiON Messaging Interface (CMI).
Both the front-end connection to the host and the back-end connection to the physical storage are 2Gb/4GB Fibre channel

The CLARiiON storage system is based upon a modular architecture.
There are four building blocks in a Clariion.

DPE - Disk Processor Enclosure – Contains  both disks and processor

DAE - Disk Array Enclosure – Contains disks only

SPE - Storage Processor Enclosure – Contains storage processor

SPS - Standby Power Supply – Provide battery backup protection

Clariion Features:

Data Integrity

    How CLARiiON keeps data safe
    (Mirrored write cache ,vault, etc)

Data Availability
  
         Ensuring uninterrupted host access to data
        (Hardware redundancy,pathfailover software(powerpath), Error reporting capability)

CLARiiON Performance

         What makes CLARiiON a great performer
        (cache, Dual SPs , Dual/quad back-end FC buses)

CLARiiON Storage Objects
             
         A first look at LUNs, and access to them
        (RAID Groups, LUNs , MetaLUNs,Storage Groups)

Vault:

Vault is a reserved area found on 1st nine disks of DPE in FC series and 1st five disks of DPE on CX series.
Data in write cache is dumped to the vault area in power failure emergency.
Once the system is turned on vault transfers dumped data back to cache

The first five drives in DAE are called vault drives
They are also used for vaulting purpose.
6.5 GB of each drive of vault drives is reserved to store Flare image, SPA and SPB boot images and for PSM LUN and Vaulting purpose


PSM LUN:

Persistent Storage Manager LUN ,created at the time of initialization by Navisphere
PSM is a hidden LUN where the records of configuration information  and access logix database  are stored.
It resides in the first three disks of code drives  
Both SPs  can access a single PSM and update themselves with new configurations via Clariion Messaging interface(CMI)

Fully redundant architecture

     SP, cooling, data paths, SPS
     Non-stop operation
     Online software upgrades
     Online hardware changes

Continuous diagnostics 
      Data and system
      CLARalert

Advanced data integrity
      Mirrored write cache
      De-stage write cache to DISK upon power failure

No single points of failure

Tiered capacity      
       FC and ATA disks      
       From five to 480 disks

Flexibility
       Mix drive types, RAID levels      
       RAID levels 0, 1, 1+0, 3, 5

Up to 16 GB memory

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