Clariion

Clariion (styled CLARiiON) is a discontinued SAN disk array manufactured and sold by EMC Corporation, it occupied the entry-level and mid-range of EMC's SAN disk array products. In 2011, EMC introduced the EMC VNX Series, designed to replace both the Clariion and Celerra products.

Upon launch in 2008, the latest generation CX4 series storage arrays supported fibre channel and iSCSI front end bus connectivity. The fibre channel back end bus offered 4 Gbit/s of bandwidth with FC-SCSI disks or SATAII disks.

The EMC Celerra NAS device is based on the same X-blade architecture as the CLARiiON storage processor.

The first CLARiiON was developed in 1992 by Data General Corporation, one of the first minicomputer companies. 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 before being made available for broader open systems attachment and renamed CLARiiON in 1994. 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. The strategy paid dividends as the company was acquired by EMC in 1999, primarily for the CLARiiON line of products.