CLARiiON

CLARiiON was born at Data General, the minicomputer maker EMC bought in 1999 largely to get its hands on this very product. Where Symmetrix was the expensive box for banks, CLARiiON was the midrange option: Fibre Channel and later iSCSI, dual controllers for redundancy, and a price ordinary enterprises could stomach.

The CX series sold in huge volumes through the 2000s. In 2011 EMC folded CLARiiON (block) and Celerra (file) into a single box, VNX, and the name faded — but the dual active-controller architecture lived on.