ONStor, Inc., the leader in SAN-based file services solutions, announced today a strategic reseller and support agreement with Nissho Electronics that will extend the reach of ONStor's advanced SAN filer offering into the Japanese marketplace. Under the terms of the agreement, Nissho will offer the ONStor product family within the Japanese market, and will provide customers with comprehensive service and support. In addition, Nissho has deployed ONStor SAN filers as the exclusive file server technology within the company's new storage-on-demand service. A major Japanese semiconductor manufacturer is among the customers for the new service offering. The ONStor SAN filer is the industry's only hardware and software platform designed to consolidate enterprise-wide file data on heterogeneous storage area networks (SANs). ONStor's innovative approach to delivering SAN-based file services centralizes and simplifies file management, while using the industry's most scalable high-performance file storage architecture to ensure continuous data availability and data protection. "Customers are demanding solutions that allow them to crank more value out of their SAN," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst of Enterprise Storage Group. "ONStor's reseller strategy gives them the arms and legs to quickly deliver file management solutions to consolidate NAS islands into the data center and simplify storage management." SAN Filers Deployed in Storage-On-Demand Service In addition to reselling ONStor solutions, Nissho has also deployed ONStor SAN filers as part of a new storage-on-demand service that allows enterprise customers to quickly scale storage capabilities in response to changing demand. With this service, users gain guaranteed performance and availability, while reducing cost by paying only for the capacity needed and by offloading storage management tasks. Nissho selected ONStor SAN filers for this application because of the solution's scalability, speed, and manageability. The newly launched storage-on-demand solution has already been selected by a major Japanese manufacturer to provide file services in support of semiconductor design automation. "Nissho's approach is to work with best-of-breed software and hardware providers who address customer needs with a quick return on investment," said Katsumi Yokoyama, managing director of Nissho Electronics. "With ONStor's SAN filer, our customers have a clear path to simplify, protect, and optimize their information infrastructure while using our advanced storage-on-demand services to reduce cost of ownership and accelerate the return on their IT investment." "ONStor has the technology, product, focus and reseller partnerships in place to quickly capitalize on the enterprise file services market opportunity," said Bob Miller, president and CEO of ONStor. "Our strategic reseller relationship with Nissho gives us the reach to deliver high-performance file services to every customer in Japan with the need to consolidate enterprise-wide file services into a single, scalable, open storage environment and reduce storage management costs."