EMC Discontinues Clariion, Celerra Storage Lines

EMC is expected to stop producing its Clariion midrange storage arrays and Celerra storage systems at the end of this year. Although the company will continue to sell the Clariion AX4 and the Celerra NX4 NAS server and gateway platform, it will discontinue the bulk of the Clariion and Celerra platforms.

The company is expected to replace these systems with both existing and future VNX and VNXe storage area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) systems, which were introduced in January.

"We will continue to sell software and hardware as updates to existing customers, but not be selling [Clariion or Celerra] to new customers," said Eric Herzog, VP of product marketing and product management for EMC's unified storage division. "We have upgraded customers from older Clariion or Celerra platforms into the newer VNX 3300 platform."

Although most Clariions and Celerras will be removed from the price list in January 2012, EMC said it will provide support for existing customers for five years. The company will also offer previous-generation hardware upgrades for the Clariion CX4 and NS, including Fibre Channel disk, I/O, and software upgrades, for 18 months past the end-of-life date.

EMC has gotten a good run out of its Clariion line; by discontinuing Clariion and Celerra it has shown its support of the new VNX and VNXe storage arrays.

The VNXe is available through the channel only; the VNX midrange storage arrays can be bought from the channel and EMC. According to Jonathan Siegal, a director of product marketing for EMC, the VNX family has accounted for two-thirds of the company's SAN/NAS storage product sales. The VNXe family starts with the VNXe3100, which offers NAS and iSCSI support starting at $9,500.

EMC has two programs to migrate Clariion and Celerra customers to VNX. The first option is a new program called EMC Enabled Do It Yourself Migrations. This program, which is available at no charge, is intended for customers with limited data migration needs and professional services budgets. It gives assistance in migrating data. EMC also offers a fixed cost migration and custom migration services.

Below the VNX are a range of products from EMC's Iomega that are targeted at small and midsize businesses. Iomega on Tuesday introduced the StorCenter px12-350r network storage array. With a capacity of 36 TBs, the px12 includes solid state drives for transaction-intensive applications, gigabit Ethernet connectivity, 4 GB of memory, and 7200 RPM disk drives. The px12-350 is the largest Iomega array and ranges in cost from $9,500 to $30,000. It is available now.

Deni Connor is founding analyst for Storage Strategies NOW, an industry analyst firm that focuses on storage, virtualization, and servers.

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