Bell Micro Extends EMC Relationship

Bell Micro will distribute EMC's Clariion arrays, and possibly its Centera fixed-content storage arrays, in North and South America, expanding a relationship that the two companies have in Europe, said Nick Ganio, president of enterprise solutions for the distributor.

EMC chose to work with Bell Micro because of the distributor's focus on storage, the value-added services it can bundle with the vendor's storage hardware sales and its knowledge of what drives storage sales and applications, Ganio said.

"Everyone will tell you storage is a commodity, that customers shop on price. But services like backup, storage resource management and data replication are not commodities," he said.

Bell Micro will help EMC expand sales, especially for the Clariion line, and represents little overlap with the vendor's other distributors, Avnet Hall-Mark and AESS (Arrow Enterprise Storage Solutions), said Terry Richardson, vice president of OEM and reseller sales at EMC.

David MacRae, president of InfraStor Technologies, a Princeton, N.J.-based solution provider, said his company plans to work with Bell Micro to pursue a relationship with EMC.

"We run headlong into EMC competition all the time," he said. "It would be good to have EMC products to work against them."

Dean Auger, a founder of Global SAN Solutions, a Birmingham, Mich.-based solution provider, said Bell Micro's addition of EMC will enable solution providers to approach higher-end storage prospects.