EMC Storage Products lineage part1:

Hardware

Celerra - NAS family
NAS product line of EMC. the products include NAS gateways, NAS storage devices & integrated devices.
CLARiiON - SAN family
Clariion series is the SAN products for entry-midrange-entrylarge level models to tap the high selling market segment.
Prodocuts includes FC & iSCSI san architectures.
Connectrix - Switches or Fabrics family
Move your organization's vital information where it needs to go—quickly, easily, and reliably. Advanced directors and switches make it happen. Get best-in-class availability and easy management.
Centera - CAS family
Store and manage your "fixed content"—unchanging digital assets—and keep them available online and accessible. All with EMC Centera® content-addressed storage (CAS) systems. Be ready for growth with petabyte scalability.
Symmetrix - SAN infrasture family
Make high-end networked storage part of your information infrastructure with systems that take performance, availability, and security to new heights. Manage and protect your information today—and expand in the future.

Software

ControlCenter[Multi-vendor management software]
Simplify and automate key tasks—such as discovery, monitoring, reporting, planning, and provisioning—for even the largest, most complex storage environments.
Celerra Manager[NAS management Spftware]
Easily configure, administer, and monitor your EMC Celerra IP storage environment from a single web-based interface—ensuring high availability.
Navisphere Management Suite [SAN management software]
Get simple, secure, web-based management from any location. Discover, monitor, configure, and report on multiple CLARiiON arrays from your browser. Use these insights to get more value from your investment.
PowerPath
Enable EMC host-based solutions including multipathing, data migration, and host-based encryption.
Symmetrix Dynamic Cache Partitioning
Enable the consolidation of multiple workloads in a single Symmetrix while maintaining predictable performance.
Symmetrix Management Console [Symmetrix management software]
Simplify day-to-day management of your EMC Symmetrix storage with this powerful, easy-to-use browser-based management tool.
Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning
Increase storage capacity utilization, improve ease of use, and enhance performance for certain applications and workloads.

Host Bus Adapter [HBA]

* HBA is an important component of Storage networks, especially in SAN architecture.
* HBA is usually host-side component & can be connected to PCI or PCI-X or PCI-E slots on the host or servers. it provides the crucial connectivity between Hosts-StorageSubsystems in Direct attached setup, provides connectivity between Host-FabricSwitches-StorageSubsystems in SAN environment.
* HBA vendors are very few, some vendors provide HBA management software & drivers along with HBA (ex: Qlogic, Emulex, Brocade etc).
* HBAs available in market may be of Fibre Channel (FC), SCSI, SAS and iSCSI interfaces.
* HBA comes in different priceband and the difference in price band is largely driven by the number of ports. HBAs are available in the market with single port, dual(2) Ports, Quad(4) ports, octa(8) ports etc. Depending on the number of Ports & the type of interfaces, the HBA cost varies from 500$ to 5000$ or even more.

Fabric-side or Switch-side Implimentation in SAN

For More info & your Feedback, contact Email ID: storagetrendz@gmail.com.

FC SAN:
* FC Switch or Fabric in SAN architecture consists of Ports (GBIC or SFP in it), FC protocol stack, Fabric Operating system & Fabric Controller units.
* The Fabric provides basic functionality of connecting multiple Hosts & Storage Sub systems together and manages the communication between them. using Fabric switch topology, about 16 million devices can be connected together in SAN Network.
* Each port on the Swicth is having Unique Address called as World Wide Node Name (WWWN) & World Wide Port Name (WWPN).
* In addition, Fabric provides advanced functionalities as given below,
1. Multi casting & Broad casting services.
2. Name Server Database services.
3. Login Services.
4. Register state Change Notification [RCN] Services.
* Fabric Zoning is the important feature provided by FC switches, By appropriately creating zones and assigning devices [HOST + storage LUNs], an administrator can create a network in which individual hosts cannot access storage devices that are controlled by another host in the FC network.

iSCSI SAN:
* iSCSI Switch or Ethernet Swicth in SAN architecture consists of Ports (ethernet ports), TCP/IP & iSCSI protocol stack, switch software & Controller units.
* The ethernet iSCSi swith provides basic functionality of connecting multiple Hosts & Storage Sub systems together and manages the communication between them.
* Each port on the Swicth is having Unique Address called as World Wide Unique Identifier (WWUI) & there are three different address format, iqn (iscsi Qualifier Name format by CiSCO), eui (Extended Unique Identifier by IEEE), naa (Network Address Authority by T11 organization).
* In addition, Fabric provides advanced functionalities as given below,
1. Uni-Casting, Multi-casting & Any-casting services.
2. Routing Database services.
3. Login Services.
* VLAN Configuration which is similar to Fabric Zoning in FC SAN.

Note:
* More info. on FC Fabric, Zoning & iSCSI Networking will be published in upcoming Posts.

SAN Introduction

* SAN is the network between Storage devices & Host/servers, designed & implemented to provide pool of Storage resources mainly to fulfill the exponential need of storage backbone for small & medium offices, Mid-range & large Enterprises Using Fibre Channel or iSCSI Technologies.
* SAN provides block-orient I/O between the Server systems and the target storage systems, in comparison of NAS that gives File-oriented I/O.
* In comparison to DAS & NAS, SAN provides High availability of storage resources, more Secure & Reliable, Cost effective, reduced Downtime, secured Backup storage solutions.
* SAN is designed & implimented using either robust Fibre Channel Technology (FC SAN) or evergreen Internet Protocol Technology (iSCSI SAN). might be using both in near future.
* The SAN is often built on a dedicated network fabric that is separated from the LAN network to ensure the latency-sensitive block I/O SAN traffic does not interfere with the traffic on the LAN network.
* Even when iSCSI SAN runs over Ethernet technology, the SAN may still be separated from the LAN either physically, or logically via VLAN to ensure the security and the QoS on the SAN traffic.
* SAN storage devices are specifically designed as stand alone devices that can communicate with the Servers or hosts of different server vendors, Operating system vendors, Host adapter vendors, Switch vendors.
* SAN Architecture, accommodates DAS Implemented setups within its infrastructure & hence, DAS & SAN setups will co-exist in the same SAN infrastructure & also allows Enterprises to migrate from existing DAS setups to newer SAN setups & implementations.
* SAN Islands, implemented in different geographical locations can communicate using gateway devices such as FCIP based gateway, iFCP based gateway & iSCSI based gateway.