[2] Upon launch in 2008,[3] the latest generation CX4 series storage arrays supported fibre channel and iSCSI front end bus connectivity.

CLARiiON was an early commercial example of a RAID product and initially sold exclusively as an array with the company's Aviion line of computer systems as the HADA (High Availability Disk Array) and later the HADA II [6] before being made available for broader open systems attachment and renamed CLARiiON in 1994.

[7] Realizing the enormous potential of storage arrays, Data General created a separate Clariion division and began selling the product as an OEM offering to its systems competitors.

While this somewhat lessened the advantages of Aviion in the marketplace, and was a source of internal corporate friction, it allowed the company to sell higher volumes and popularize the brand.

In 2011, EMC introduced the new VNX series of unified storage disk arrays intended to replace both CLARiiON and Celerra products.

West realized the potential for more advanced and openly compatible data-storage devices, as did competitors such as Digital Equipment Corporation with their StorageWorks product.

Features mentioned in the patent paperwork included optional hot swapping,[10] guide rails for proper electrical contact, and a method to lock the drives in place once they were secured in the disk enclosure.

Other notable features include industry's first dual active-controller design, mirrored write cache, full system redundancy and hot repair.

[citation needed] From there, the Clariion range grew into a faster, more expandable midrange storage platform, culminating in the FC5700 under Data General.

After EMC's acquisition of Data General, significant development of a new range of Clariion arrays took place, resulting in the FC4500 and FC4700.

Subsequent processor and bandwidth upgrades led to a new CX lineup (CX300, CX500, CX700) and a low end SATA based Clariion array, the AX100 (now updated to AX150).

The lineup, consisting of the CX3-20, CX3-40 and CX3-80, was the industry's only storage platform to leverage end-to-end 4 Gbit/s (4 billion bits per second) Fibre Channel and PCI-Express technologies.

[citation needed] The Clariion is built on an Intel platform and has quite unique software layer: it runs two operating environments in parallel.

This provides a fully redundant active-active configuration, with both storage processors serving requests and each acting as failover for the other so that initiators see the array as active-passive.

Crashes were uncommon when the use of FC fabrics become common place, but the general issue of trespassing lived on until a certain firmware (FLARE) level with ALUA support was released, ca.

The Fibre Channel connection supports transfer speeds of up to 2 Gbit/s (with both AL and SW configurations), iSCSI is physically limited to max.

Major New Features in the CX4 UltraFlex Series include support for solid state flash drives, 64-bit FLARE Operating Environment and PCI-Express based SLIC I/O cards.

The new version of the FLARE operating environment that ships with the CX4 series includes support for the 64-bit Intel Xeon CPUs in the Storage Processors.