Post by Andy
Harris with Sunnyvale IT Pros and Coders, Inc
Fujitsu Cloud Services
Fujitsu joins the groups of cloud competitors, supplying computer infrastructure
as a service through its expanded data centers.
Yet supplier of cloud infrastructure services has entered into competition
with Amazon.com, Google, and Microsoft: Fujitsu, with an expanded, 41,000 square foot data center in Sunnyvale, Calif.
Fujitsu will make servers, networking,
and storage in the data center available for use by the hour in the first quarter of 2010, concentrating mainly on services
that put the emphasis on privacy and security in a multi-tenant facility. "We will primarily offer private cloud infrastructure
for the enterprise and a platform of choice for independent software vendors," said D. Lawson, senior director of solutions
offerings and architecture.
By "private"
cloud, Lawson said he expects retail companies to be able to host transaction processing applications in the Fujitsu cloud
and "remain PCI compliant."
Fujitsu has primed its Dallas data center to serve as its retail processing site.
Fujitsu will offer retail customers tailored services to make cloud computing more attractive to them, including Fujitsu's
Global Store retail application as a service.
Lawson said Fujitsu will target other vertical industries, including financial
services, manufacturing, and healthcare. The announcement said healthcare
applications will be hosted in "a HIPAA compliant environment." When questioned further
on that point, Lawson said the firm was still discussing healthcare data compliance with its
Canadian data center, which currently does healthcare data processing. Healthcare
regulations, however, change when crossing international borders.
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Lawson said
he expects 81% of the data center to consist of Windows servers, 16% Unix servers, and 6.5% Linux servers. This gives
Fujitsu more of a mixed workload capability than Amazon's strictly Windows and Linux cloud service.
Fujitsu is also aiming its cloud
operations to serve as a hosting center for independent software vendors to offer their applications as software as a service.
CoolRock Software, a New Zealand supplier of e-mail management and archiving software, will
offer its wares as a service in the Fujitsu cloud.
Intershop Communications, a big
time German supplier of e-commerce applications, will also offer hosted applications through Fujitsu.
"We need to be flexible. One
size will not fit all," said Lawson in an interview. Fujitsu expects to deal with both large enterprises and small and
medium-sized companies with its cloud offerings.
Fujitsu says it has expanded its Silcon Valley Sunnyvale data center's compute
capacity by a factor of eight; it has doubled the raised floor space. It's equipped the center mostly with Fujitsu Primergy
RX300 servers, a dual socket Intel Xeon 5500 (Nehalem) machine
occupying a 2u space in a rack.
It will rely on Fujitsu Eternus storage, and Fujitsu
10-gigabit Ethernet switches for the data center's core backbone fabric. The facility has been
upgraded to the UptimeInstitute's Tier III standard, which means
servers have redundant components and power supplies and can maintain a 99.98% uptime.
Fujitsu has
also submitted an application programming interface to access services in its data center to the Open Cloud Standards Incubator
of the Distributed Management Task Force, a public standards body. Fujitsu is following the example of VMware,
which also submitted the specification for its vCloud API to the incubator.
By becoming
public standards, the APIs encourage cloud users to have confidence they will have "programmatic control" over workloads
they send to the cloud and be able to move their workloads from the Fujitsu cloud to another cloud, if they choose.
Fujitsu is seeking to standardize its API so customers "do not need to worry about vendor lock-in," said Lawson.
Fujitsu has
previously established cloud services in Japan and Europe. The Sunnyvale announcement "is another step in a global rollout," he said.
Lawson said Fujitsu designs its data centers around energy efficient principles
and reduces carbon emissions 21% over previous generation data centers. It includes a hydrogen fuel-cell generator supplying
power to its cooling systems.
