eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Fujitsu Computer Systems Corp. is bringing its utility computing strategy to North America, expanding an initiative that has been used in Japan for two years.
Named Triole, the strategy is similar in goals to initiatives from other vendors, including Hewlett-Packard Co.s Adaptive Enterprise, IBMs on-demand computing and Sun Microsystems Inc.s N1: to create a flexible and dynamic IT infrastructure that is virtualized into a single pool and provisioned and deployed according to business demands.
But while those other initiatives are services-driven, Fujitsus is more about offering customers a tested and proven package of technologies, said Vernon Turner, an analyst with International Data Corp.
“The others are saying that they will come into an enterprise and help them get their data centers set up for utility computing,” said Turner, in Framingham, Mass. “Fujitsu is saying, Well build it outside of your own environment.”
Fujitsus strategy, unveiled Tuesday in the United States, focuses on three core areas, according to officials with the Sunnyvale, Calif., company: virtualization, automation and integration.
Fujitsu Computer Systems—a subsidiary of Fujitsu Ltd.—earlier this month rolled out a key part of the Triole push with the North American introduction of FlexFrame for mySAP Business Suite. The offering, which involves such standard technology as blade servers and Linux, is a combination of hardware, storage and software designed to bring a virtualized utility computing environment to SAP deployments.
Another example is the Interstage XML Search engine, middleware that enables fast database searches by allowing users to extract data from multiple databases and gives a unified view across those databases, said Richard McCormack, vice president of product and solutions marketing for Fujitsu. It also offers such features as automatic load balancing, he said.
The search engine was released in the United States in October, but McCormack said it is the first component of the Interstage suite of integration software to be part of Triole, being integrated into Fujitsus Intel Corp.-based Primergy blade servers and SPARC-based PrimePower systems.
Next page: Automating rules policies.
Page Two
A key part of the automation offering will roll out next month when Fujitsu releases Resource Coordinator, middleware that will enable users to automate their rules policies, officials said.
Fujitsu will develop 20 “platform integration”—or Pi—templates that will serve as building blocks to help speed the construction of Triole-based installations and drive down costs. Customers will get pre-tested and pre-integrated offerings that they can more easily deploy, Fujitsu officials said.
Fujitsu, which runs a Pi center in Japan, will look to open another one in the United States. The center is a centralized place where Fujitsu can train its own people on the technology as well as demonstrate for customers how to implement the templates, McCormack said.
Officials said customers in Japan have seen a 33 percent improvement in reliability and upward of 40 percent reductions in downtime using the Triole offerings.
Fujitsus market share in the Japanese market is more than in the United States, which is dominated by the likes of IBM, HP and Sun. In North America, Triole will work as a gateway to get Fujitsu products into heterogeneous environments, McCormack said.
IDCs Turner said an advantage for Fujitsu is that it is bringing a product to the United States that has been tested for more than a year in Japan.
“They cut their teeth locally before going out with it globally,” he said.
Check out eWEEK.coms Infrastructure Center for the latest news, views and analysis on servers, switches and networking protocols for the enterprise and small businesses.