Fujitsu has introduced new members of its Integrated Systems portfolio, intended to provide customers with preconfigured hardware and software stacks, capable of speeding up the deployment of specific workloads and avoiding common difficulties with integration.
Like many of its competitors, Fujitsu is positioning itself to provide prebuilt stacks, including compute, networking, storage, OS, middleware, databases and business applications. Doing so has deployment benefits for customers, but also increases the barriers to later migration.
Fujitsu Integrated Systems are available in multiple form factors, with certified stacks tuned for specific environments, including SAP HANA, server virtualisation and private cloud deployment.
At the low end, Fujitsu offers cluster-in-a-box systems, comprising dual Windows servers, shared storage and networking in a standalone or rackmount single enclosure. The cluster-in-a-box products have been updated with new storage configurations for Windows Server 2012 R2, with support for SSD and automatic storage tiering for increased performance, or operating as NAS storage accommodating up to 140 disks.
"Cluster-in-a-box is a small, but complete data centre, a ready-to-run Integrated System that fits the needs of mid-sized organisations and branch offices," said Hans-Dieter Wysuwa, executive vice-president, service platform, global product business, Fujitsu. "Turning it on and spending a few minutes with the configuration wizard means it is up and running in less than an hour."
A key concern for customers is compatibility: a single firmware update in a key component can cause conflicts and reduce performance or cause data loss. Integrated system stacks address this concern by providing factory-certified combinations of hardware and software, with lifecycle management contracts ensuring that updates are pre-tested to avoid conflicts.
Fujitsu's Integrated Systems platforms are complemented by a cloud computing portfolio, including managed data centre services, hosting facilities and Fujitsu's own infrastructure as a service products. The company is investing $2 billion over the next two years in data centre expansions to increase its cloud capability, with new data centres opening in multiple countries - but nothing planned on the African continent as yet.
Next-generation communications technology is expected to deliver dramatic changes to data centres from as early as next year. Fujitsu demonstrated prototypes of its silicon photonics interconnects, which use optical signalling to replace system buses like PCIe. Photonics can provide interconnect speeds up to 50x faster than today's electronic buses, over distances up to 300m. This could allow not only improved performance but also radical redesigns in computing architectures in terms of scale and energy-efficiency designs.
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