Fujitsu unveils major step towards business-centric data centre

With a focus on growing and consolidating its portfolio for the data centre, Fujitsu is launching a new, streamlined family of validated Integrated Systems, comprised of straightforward reference architectures and pre-integrated ready-to-run systems. Thanks to pre-validation, these systems guarantee the compatibility of all their components, including servers and operating systems, storage, network, and system management.

The new Fujitsu Integrated Systems line-up starts with simple general-purpose infrastructures and general purpose platforms for middleware and is topped by systems for purpose-built application integration. All reduce complexity and risk by offering more rapid deployment times without trial-and-error testing. Once in place, Integrated Systems are providing faster payback periods since they optimise resource utilisation for complex environments such as in-memory applications like SAP HANA, which are compute, networking and storage-intensive.

Fujitsu’s Integrated Systems portfolio combines the company’s own powerful PRIMERGY and PRIMEQUEST servers and ETERNUS and NetApp FAS storage platforms with best-of-breed third-party technologies, to create solutions built from best-in-class components. Building on a long heritage of Integrated Systems such as FlexFrame for SAP environments, Fujitsu is now broadening its portfolio, and takes the guesswork out of getting system configuration right first time, every time, by offering comprehensive installation guidelines and configuration descriptions as standard for its Integrated Systems.

With its new line-up, Fujitsu has created eight different principal use cases for Integrated Systems – from SAP, and Microsoft environments through to systems designed for big data, IT security, server virtualisation, virtual desktop infrastructure, private cloud and high-performance computing. For each, Fujitsu offers a range of solutions, with brands including FlexFrame, RapidStructure and vShape.

For organisations looking for the next level of integration for reference architectures, Fujitsu also offers optional pre-installation in a system staging centre, which ensures that reference architectures are ready-to-run immediately from delivery on customer premises.

In making the move to Integrated Systems, organisations potentially face new complexity in keeping entire systems up-to-date. This issue is addressed with Fujitsu Lifecycle Management services, a service package that manages all components within the Integrated System, through their entire lifecycle. Customers can also choose to hand over the entire responsibility for operating and maintaining their systems by choosing Fujitsu Data Centre Services such as Managed Data Centre, Managed Hosting and Fujitsu Cloud IaaS.

Next-generation data centre technology due in 2015
Fujitsu also announces that it is working with Intel to use the disruptive technology of Silicon Photonics to develop next-generation technology for the data centre, which increase the throughput of system data by a 50-fold factor and reduce system latency. Today, typical server configurations tend to overprovision functionality and underutilise resources. Fujitsu Silicon Photonics-based systems – expected to be commercially available within the next 12 months – will change the way enterprises build and operate data centres.

Such a performance increase opens up new horizons and opportunities in using large-scale data sets. It will also radically change data centre design in favour of dynamic resource pools, where users are able to access the computing, processing, network and storage capabilities in line with their exact application needs. Individual components will be disaggregated, since Silicon Photonics can transfer data over distances up to 300 meters without any perceptible impact on performance.

The ability to remove system performance bottlenecks that hamper today’s data centres is especially compelling when handling large-scale volumes of data, running into Petabytes. By replacing traditional connections between data centre components with light (photonics)-based interconnects, data can be moved through running systems up to 50x faster than today’s state-of-the-art 16GB Fiber Channel technology. Resource pools can be optimised independently to achieve the optimum combination of performance, density, energy efficiency and cost.

The provision of this almost limitless bandwidth enables the optimised use of server resources in combination with direct access to Storage Class Memory connected to different server nodes via Silicon Photonics interconnects. This will provide huge performance benefits in all data intensive environments, such as cluster solutions and in-memory databases. Our vision is to have no dedicated storage, just large, redundant and highly available SCM pools which can be addressed by CPU loads with Store Operations.