Fujitsu announces a second IaaS play

Fujitsu has announced that it will deploy a second infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering from an Australian data centre that will form part of a "global cloud platform" being rolled out by the IT services giant.

Australia will be the first country to roll out the cloud compute service after Japan, where it was developed by Fujitsu's in-house staff.

The company plans to launch the same service in Singapore, the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany shortly after.

The service enters a pilot stage in Japan next month before a commercial offering is made available in October.

Australian customers are promised access by the start of 2011.

The Japanese IT services giant claimed it would complement rather than compete with an existing IaaS platform Fujitsu Australia launched earlier this year, which is hosted in Fujitsu's Australian data centres and is based on Fujitsu hardware, Cisco switches and software from CA and VMware.

A global solution

The IaaS service announced today, by contrast, is an all-Fujitsu affair - based on Fujitsu hardware (servers and storage), Fujitsu network switches and Fujitsu software (a derivative of the open source Xen hypervisor).

Fujitsu said it would offer customers an interactive portal through which they can provision server platforms (including app servers and database servers), dynamic firewalls and load balancing.

Cameron McNaught, general manager of solutions at Fujitsu Australia said that the interface allows for drag and drop of memory and storage to re-size a service on the fly.

"It's very granular," he said.

The same service will be made available across five countries such that a multinational organisation can outsource to a "global cloud".

According to McNaught, Fujitsu Australia was yet to decide whether to deploy the service from its data centres in Sydney, Perth (coming online within months) or its Noble Park, Melbourne facility.

McNaught said the service should appeal to those Australian organisations or Government departments that have a requirement to keep data onshore today, but want the flexibility to push it out to a global cloud in the future.

"Data sovereignty is important to our Australian customers," he said, but the dream of a follow-the-sun (or in this case, follow the cheapest operational environment) approach is "the vision of where the cloud could take us to."

McNaught said Fujitsu Australia is open to discussing the solution with existing or new customers, but has no information yet as to whether it will charge customers for the service during the pilot.