Bell Microproducts today announced that it has signed a distribution agreement with Pliant Technology, developer of Lightning Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs), a new class of high performance, high reliability storage drives that meet the needs of data centers and other high-performance computing environments. Under the terms of the agreement, Bell Micro will market and distribute Pliant's full line of Lightning EFDs throughout North America.

According to Joe Cousins, vice president of marketing for Bell Micro, "Bell Micro continues to be on the leading edge of storage technology, and we are seeing solid state drive technology being embraced more and more by our enterprise customers. There is a significant opportunity for Bell Micro and our customers, and we are bringing our vast storage expertise to bear on the SSD space. By aligning ourselves with enterprise SSD storage suppliers like Pliant, we can leverage our expertise in serving this customer base and create a win-win situation."

Pliant's Lightning EFDs innovative design dramatically improves performance and reliability of SAS storage and IT systems, while significantly reducing cost, space requirements and energy consumption. Lightning EFDs deliver the industry's highest sustained performance with the most predictable performance profile across a wide range of read/write workloads, and have been specifically designed for demanding, mission-critical 24x7 applications.

"Pliant chose to partner with Bell Micro because of their enterprise storage expertise and their unique focus on the opportunities for solid state storage to address the challenges facing today's enterprise IT storage OEMs, integrators and their customers," noted Eric Shiroke, vice president of sales for Pliant. "We are confident that our distribution partnership with Bell Micro will help us effectively and efficiently bring these innovative products to the enterprise storage market."

The Pliant Lightning EFD family includes the Lightning LB and Lightning LS models. With capacities ranging from 150GB to 300GB and available in standard 2.5-inch (LB) and 3.5-inch (LS) form factors, they easily integrate into Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) based enterprise storage and server systems, without requiring modifications to existing applications, operating systems or infrastructure.

Pliant's full line of SSDs is now available through Bell Microproducts.

Please call 1-800-800-1513 or visit www.bellmicro.com.