Fujitsu ascends to new cloud offerings, expands data center to cover enterprises and ISVs

Many companies are intrigued by the potential cost savings and agility promised by cloud computing, but a lot of those are unsure about how to get in and when, as well as how. Fujitsu is rising to the occasion with end-to-end cloud services designed to help both enterprises and independent software vendors (ISVs).

Fujitsu says its new solution will allow companies migrate existing multi-platform and multi-vendor mission-critical systems to enterprise clouds. The benefit of this is that it will remove capital-intensive investments in technology and replace them with a pay-as-you-go strategy.

Scheduled for launch in the first quarter of 2010, the Fujitsu services have already attracted several ISVs, who plan to offer their own services to clients, using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. To accommodate the move, Fujitsu has upgraded its Sunnyvale, Calif. data center to the Tier III level and will support the cloud application programming interface (API).

Designed for enterprises in manufacturing, finance, healthcare, retail and other compute- and data-intensive industries, Fujitsu's cloud solutions include system construction, operations, maintenance services and full-featured vertical applications. In order to comply with vertical industry standards and regulations, retail transactional applications will be hosted in a payment-card industry (PCI) compliant data center and health care applications will be hosted in a health insurance portability and accountability act (HIPAA) compliant environment.

Going green

In addition, the multi-million dollar data-center upgrade and expansion will more than double available raised floor space, reduce carbon emissions by 21 percent, and increase available power and cooling capabilities that will dramatically expand the data center’s effective capacity by over 800 percent.

The redesign leverages technology from Fujitsu, including its PalmSecure palm vein recognition technology for physical access control, Fujitsu 10-gigabit switch technology for core backbone fabric, and Fujitsu PRIMERGY server and ETERNUS storage technologies. Sunnyvale will join other premier Fujitsu Tier-III+ and Tier IV facilities in the Americas, including Dallas, Montreal and Trinidad, in delivering high-availability IT solutions.

. . . Upgrade and expansion will . . . reduce carbon emissions by 21 percent, and increase available power and cooling capabilities that will dramatically expand the data center’s effective capacity by over 800 percent.

Fujitsu recently announced enhancements to its Interstage Cloud business process management (BPM) service, which will be migrated to the new secure cloud platform as soon as it is available.

The goal of the cloud API submitted by Fujitsu to the Open Cloud Standards Incubator of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) is to maintain interoperability among various cloud computing environments, so clients don't need to worry about vendor lock-in when adopting a particular cloud computing platform. Fujitsu plans to actively participate in the standardization process of the DMTF and aims to implement the API as part of its next-generation infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform.

Among the first ISVs to take advantage of the new cloud services offerings are CoolRock Software, an ISV specializing in email management software for archiving, ediscovery and collaboration, and Intershop Communications, a leading ecommerce solutions ISV.

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