Fujitsu lead industry charge with first 99.99% resilient Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for UK and Ireland Enterprises

London, 23 November 2009 – Fujitsu is launching the first cloud based infrastructure service designed for organisations in the UK and Ireland. No longer will customers need to purchase servers, software, data centre space or network equipment individually, rather they can now buy those resources as a service charged on a pay per use basis. The new service, called ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS), is immediately available and completes the four layers of Fujitsu’s Dynamic Infrastructures portfolio.

Fujitsu IaaS has been designed for medium and large enterprises who want to rapidly drive out costs from the IT infrastructure. This is achieved by reducing the need for capital expenditure and reducing operational costs by up to 40%.  This is done without compromising either the resilience of the IT system or the security of their organisation. 
IaaS will include the following elements:
- Resilient up to 99.99%
- Secure infrastructure in UK data centres
- Scalable enterprise class IT - up and down

IaaS is a pay as you use service.  With this service customers have unrivalled options that combine Fujitsu’s industry leading Eternus storage and Primergy server technologies, together with products from Cisco, EMC and VMware. This new service in combination with Fujitsu’s consultancy advice and implementation skills will enable organisations to quickly emerge from the recession.

IT decision makers are aware of the potential benefits afforded by a cloud approach, including cost reduction and greater business and IT flexibility, however security and resilience in particular continue to cause wide-spread concern. In fact research* conducted by Fujitsu in September showed senior IT decision makers are looking for specific requirements to be met before they will entrust their business systems on a cloud service. In particular they wanted an industrial strength solution from market leaders who are able to provide the security, reliability and performance they demand. Critically the “as a service” solution needs to be able to run corporate systems as well as use technology from IT suppliers that business enterprises already trust and most often choose. 

Commenting on the launch, Darren Ratcliffe, chief architect for Infrastructure as a Service at Fujitsu UK and Ireland, commented: "Cloud as a concept has been talked about for a number of years and delivered very successfully by point software offerings such as Salesforce.com.  What we've not yet seen is something that pulls everything together with a secure cloud service that delivers the cost savings, flexibility and reliability organisations need.  As the cloud model continues to disrupt traditional IT thinking and is hyped in all corners we are in danger of it becoming ever more intangible – a huge factor in CIOs still being reluctant to take on what is often quite a nebulous proposition.”

Ratcliffe added: "We believe the powerful and experienced combination of Fujitsu, Cisco, EMC and VMware means there is now a clear business reason to take advantage of the benefits of a cloud model."

John McCool, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center, Switching and Services Group for Cisco said: “We are working closely with key partners to deliver integrated data center infrastructure solutions that help our customers accelerate data center virtualization and cloud services. Working with Fujitsu, we are helping them deliver a new IaaS offering by integrating Cisco’s industry leading Nexus Family Switches, MDS Family switches and security solutions as part of the core data center infrastructure.”

“In the future, IT infrastructure will be delivered as a service, and Fujitsu is leading the way” said Chuck Hollis, global marketing CTO for EMC Corporation. “By combining their own technology with best-of-breed technologies from VMware, Cisco and EMC, Fujitsu can deliver outstanding results as compared with traditional approaches.”

Steve Jackson, senior director, Systems Integrators, Outsourcers and Service Providers EMEA at VMware, said: “For the first time, UK businesses can realistically enjoy the increased agility and cost savings delivered by virtualisation-enabled cloud computing, without compromising the levels of security and resilience required by today’s leading organisations. By integrating our market leading vSphere virtualisation solution with other best of breed cloud-enabling technologies, Fujitsu is making cloud computing a feasible approach for businesses.”
 
* The research was conducted in September 2009 amongst 35 CIOs across private and public sector organisations.  They were asked to rank the most important features required of an Infrastructure as a Service on a scale of one to six – with six being the most important and one being not important at all.  The features were ranked by the CIOs as follows:

Security services         5.41      
Failover services         5.03      
Availability of services      4.93      
Transition skills         4.73      
System performance monitoring   4.63      
Time for additional capacity      4.33      
IT advice service         4.27      
Timescale for setup      4.17      
Multiple country support      3.07