Bell Micro to distribute Flexstar

Bell Microproducts and Flexstar Technology have reached an agreement whereby Bell Micro will distribute Flexstar's desktop series of test solutions to the Americas and EMEA, states Trading Markets.

As part of this relationship, Bell Micro will distribute Flexstar's testing systems with a primary focus on small to mid-range industrial system manufacturers that use storage devices in their systems.

As the first non-captive supplier of storage test systems, Flexstar's products support the enhanced speed and capacity requirements of the newest generation of hard disc drives and solid-state storage devices.

The high cost of deploying storage area networks (SANs) has kept many SMEs from leveraging the power of networked storage, reports Express Computer Online.

Storage area networks used to be out of the grasp of the average SME but that's changed now. All thanks to a combination of iSCSI and relatively inexpensive SATA or SAS drives bundled into one box rather than costly fibre channel, and growing interest in open source storage software.

Harmeet Malhotra, senior manager of enterprise storage marketing-APJ, Dell India, said: “Although SAN has been adopted in the past couple of years by enterprises, DAS [direct-attached storage] still remains the dominant form of data storage within the SME segment as it offers the lowest dollar per terabyte of storage.”

According to Virtualisation Journal, StarWind Software is providing a hands-on instructional guide that will offer easy steps for IT professionals at small and mid-size companies to quickly and easily build their own SANs using industry-standard, off-the-shelf x86 hardware and freely available storage software.

StarWind is making this 'Essential guide to building a SAN' available to anyone that has wanted to implement centralised network storage but found SAN products generally available for purchase are too expensive, too complex and meant for larger companies.

Today nearly all small and medium companies are looking to move server data from DAS to centralised networked storage which makes the data easily available and significantly easier to manage and protect.