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I wrote this guide on how to build your own EMC Clariion CX700 SPS sense cables (Amphenol, part number 118-28717) mostly out of frustration. There is a decisive lack of information out there regarding “legacy” EMC Clariion storage systems and what parts are available, including the SPS sense cables, are being sold at unreasonably inflated prices. Price gouging is rampant for legacy EMC hardware and the SPS sense cables are no exception. I have yet to determine why a simple DB9-to-RJ12 serial cable, which is all the EMC Clariion SPS cable is, could ever justifiably cost more than $20-$30.

Download The Guide! (Don’t worry, I’m not sending you to some cheesy ebook site, asking you for your personal information, or demanding a credit card number.)

Unlike some noteworthy organizations out there, I accept the fact that it is impossible to control what someone will do with information. They may take my guide and try to sell it for a profit. They may bundle it in with some other product and try to sell that. They may expect you to pay a subscription fee or, in some way get you to part with your money in exchange for it. I have no control over this and I accept that fact. Rather than launch into some boring diatribe on copyright and stipulating a myriad of useless, unenforceable restrictions on what you can and can’t do with this document I will simply say that it is intended to be free and available to anyone that wants it. If you paid for it, then you have my condolences on your monetary loss. If you are downloading it with the intent of selling my work for your own profit, I would make an attempt to appeal to your honorable side and ask that you not sell it. But then again, if you’re already making money at the expense of someone else, you probably didn’t have an honorable side to appeal to in the first place.

My employer recently purchased two EMC Clariion CX700 storage arrays with a combined total storage capacity of about 12TB. We acquired these storage arrays from a local company that was liquidating all of their assets and shutting down. Because this was my first foray into true storage area networking I set about looking for any software, documentation, and resources I could find that would facilitate the integration of these units into our environment. Throughout the entire process, from research to implementation, I learned a great deal about EMC and their Clariion CX700 storage systems. I also learned exactly how difficult it can be to dig up certain tidbits of information on legacy products that are acquired outside EMC’s approved list of vendors and resellers.

One such bit of information I was looking for was the pinout for the Standby Power Supply (SPS) cable for my CX700. It should have been a relatively straightforward search, yet there was very little useful information out there on the subject. Furthermore, searching for the actual OEM cable from a vendor turned up few useful results. Suppliers that listed this cable on their site were either out of stock or back ordered and a select few that did have them were price gouging simply because the cable was an EMC part. Fortunately a friend of mine went rummaging through some surplus hardware he had lying around and found a few of these SPS cables, so I wound up getting a couple from him. I did figure out the pinout on these cables and will be posting a guide on how to make the cables for interested parties.

We now have the EMC Clariion CX700 SAN up and running in our office, racked it its own APC NetShelter 42U cabinet. It’s being used for central virtual machine storage for a Hyper-V failover cluster as well as data replication storage. Though EMC now considers the Clariion CX700 a “legacy” SAN, it is still a very fast and reliable system. While I’m certain that EMC would prefer I spend five or six figures on a newer SAN with less than a quarter of the storage currently provided by our CX700, there is still a considerable amount of use that can be derived from this system. With the substantial amount of spare parts and the extra vault pack I have shelved in the server room, I should be able to contend with any problems that arise.  I’d like to think that the choice to purchase and reuse our little Clariion CX700 SAN has, in some small way, given the term “going green” some tangible credibility.