Bell Microproducts, Inc., a leading value-added provider of storage products and solutions, and FalconStor Software, Inc., a leading developer of network storage software solutions, announced that the companies are partnering to deliver backup and recovery appliances for the small and medium business (SMB) market.
The appliances, built by Bell Microproducts and powered by FalconStor technology, are cost-effective, scalable, and easy to deploy and manage. The family of turnkey appliances will be available in two flavors: one based on FalconStor’s VirtualTape Library (VTL) software, and the other based on FalconStor’s iSCSI Storage Server software.
“SMBs face the same issues and have the same needs as large enterprises in terms of backup and disaster recovery,” said Gary Gammon, senior vice president of Enterprise Sales & Marketing for Bell Microproducts. “Working with FalconStor on tailoring these appliances for SMBs is a natural growth of our long standing relationship. We believe in their technology, since we have been using FalconStor’s IPStor software in our internal data centers over the last few years.”
“Data protection is crucial in today’s business environment, and these appliances give SMBs the access to storage services enjoyed by larger businesses,” said Donald Mead, FalconStor vice president of storage networking solutions. “Bell Microproducts has the distinction of being our first customer, so we naturally turned to them to deliver these turnkey appliances.”
The turnkey VTL appliance consolidates the management of backup resources while enhancing the reliability of backup operations and accelerating the speed of recovery. FalconStor’s VTL software leverages and provisions industry standard high-speed disk as virtual tape drives/libraries to backup servers attached to a SAN via Fibre Channel (FC), iSCSI or NDMP protocol to maximize performance and return on investment.
The turnkey iSCSI Storage Server appliance addresses the needs of SMB/departmental customers by enabling Windows Servers to offer SAN-based snapshot, delta replication and zero-impact backup and restore services to application hosts attached to an IP network. To optimize system availability and business productivity, the iSCSI Storage Server also offers mirroring and cluster services, which enable continuous operation during a planned or unplanned outage.
This announcement is the expansion of the relationship between Bell Microproducts and FalconStor, and is another initiative to drive channel partner opportunities. To promote sales of these turnkey appliances through the channel, FalconStor has established a lead registration program. Resellers who promote FalconStor products and register their leads qualify for higher margins, further enhancing the reseller partnership benefits and continuing the commitment to a channel-only business model.
