Fujitsu Frontech Lets Enterprises Shape the Private Cloud to Meet Their Needs

It is hard to imagine anything has gotten more tech talk than all things cloud (public, virtual, private and hybrid) recently. The possible exceptions are all things “social” and/or “mobile.” That said -- and with a tip of the hat to the industry analysts generating hockey-stick growth charts — Forrester forecasts private cloud growth from $7.74B in 2011 to $66.43B by 2020 and Gartner (News - Alert) sees cloud services going from $68.3B in 2011 to $148.8B by 2014; one would think there is little new to say as we get ready for conference season. That would be wrong. 

TMCnet recently sat down with Vic Herring, Vice President of Sales and Marketing of the Cloud Infrastructure Solutions Group at Fujitsu (News - Alert) Frontech North America, Inc., to discuss the recently released and continually evolving Fujitsu NuVola Private Cloud Platform.   

If you missed its introduction in October, there is a lot to consider that is new, different and worth noting if you are an enterprise IT manager contemplating the current skies and forecasts.  It is also noteworthy because, while the SMB market has been seen as the low-hanging fruit in forecasts for cloud growth, Fujitsu has its sights set not only there but also on larger enterprises. The reasons are twofold, namely, there is a product void window now open and a true market need to be filled.

NuVola is…

Deriving its name from the Italian term for “cloud,” the NuVola Private Cloud Platform is described by Fujitsu as, “an appliance-based solution built with class-leading Fujitsu storage and server products, and paired with advanced software tools and utilities that transform business critical processes by leveraging private cloud computing power, security and scalability.”  

As Herring points out, this might sound similar to other cloud vendor pitches. However, in reality, the unique appliance approach to private cloud deployment makes IT managers’ lives easier. He stated that, “Unlike the past where they had the daunting prospects of specifying, buying, building, and then managing cloud environments using internal resources (people) not necessarily proficient at doing so that is now off the table. “

 Herring said, “The value of NuVola is that it reduces the time to deploy, lowers the burden of expertise for IT staff, and optimizes the use and efficiency of resources without sacrificing IT control of sensitive information and the ability to provide the enterprise operational excellence.”

NuVola fits four important categories I see as critical to cloud deployment adoption going forward:

“Utilitization”: Hard to say, but important to grasp. It means giving IT managers the ability to offer “Everything as a Service” (“EaaS”).  In this instance “E” means “Infostructure” — the physical and virtual network and computing capabilities that enable users to have what they need when and how they need it according to defined and strictly enforced policy and rules. This is “utility” as in pervasive, high-performance, secure, always on and all ways accessible “service.”  It is also “utility” as in “useful.”

Searchable/Actionable:  Clouds are about optimizing the use of data centers and leveraging things like virtualization and SOA gateways to speed the flow of information and make transactions frictionless along with providing a rich set of analytics for things like governance and compliance. The bottom line is, if it can’t be found and used quickly and efficiently, it is of diminished value.

“Lego-like”:  Theun-fancy way ofsaying “extensible” or “scalable.” IT managers have declared the days of proprietary solutions and long implementation periods over. They are demanding a best-in-breed, open and pay-as-you-grow approach which a big stick that nowadays an alternative is just a click away. They want building blocks and not lock-ins.

Secure:  Speaks for itself.

In the name of full disclosure, these categories have been criteria I use in evaluating solutions that I have employed implicitly or explicitly long before NuVola happened to fit all of the above.

Where NuVola sits    

This is a case where a picture really is worth potentially thousands of words. 

There is a reference model that goes with all of this, so that IT managers have an understanding of where the NuVola Platform appliances and the applications they provide as part of utilitization fit now and going forward. And, while NuVola relies heavily on its Fujitsu brethren for best-in-breed storage and servers, the names in green deserve attention. Indeed, some are likely to become very important names in the not too-distant future, and all will bear the “powered by Fujitsu” moniker as part of the NuVola platform.

Perfect Search: Part of NuVola since November, this is an index-based search engine between 10 to 1,000 times faster than traditional search engines. For example, Google (News - Alert) uses 100 servers to search 1B documents, “PerfectSearch powered by Fujitsu” uses one server. It enables hyper federation of data by collapsing islands of disparate databases such as MS SQL, Oracle, DB2, MySQL, Outlook, LotusNotes, Groupwise, Sharepoint, Documentum, Interwoven (News - Alert), PDF, Image files, Video, MP3, etc. And it searches both structured and unstructured data. This is a breakthrough not just in speed and functionality, but provides exponential cost savings.

CodecSys™ powered by Fujitsu appliance: Another initial launch part of the NuVola ecosystem, this is a multi-codec transcoding engine from Broadcast International (News - Alert). It matches codec to scene requirement providing dynamic tuning of codec to output device and selects optimized codec for bandwidth offered. Bandwidth specific file preparation for streaming, live or file-based is featured, and it cuts bandwidth requirements by 50 percent or more along with eliminating proprietary hardware-based appliances from the video optimization process. Best yet, as part of the cloud layer of operations it is accessible from anywhere on a network.

In the “coming soon” category -- meaning in the next few weeks -- are:

Strongbox® powered by Fujitsu:  An on-demand, business logic-driven archive solution. It incorporates disk and linear tape file systems and puts them online while meeting compliance requirements for access and storage of medical records, financial data, legal documents, multi-media content and cloud application content. Strongbox is provided by Crossroads Systems, Inc.

PureDiscovery powered by Fujitsu: An appliance network server-based solution that performs semantics-based analytics based on the meaning of words and not just the occurrence of the word itself. The appliance will come in three sizes -- Pod, SMB and Enterprise; benefits include:

Massively Scalable Intelligence: currently scales to hundreds of millions of documents. Federated Reach:  index-agnostic, meaning that wherever data resides, whatever technology was used to index it, PureDiscovery can connect and issue semantic queries.

Transparent Semantic Analysis:  PureDiscovery provides transparent semantic analytics

Powerful Visual Interface: The visual interface has been engineered to be as intuitive as using Google Earth.

PureDiscovery is claimed to be the only semantic technology on the market that allows users to interact with the machine’s built in intelligence.

Validation in the market and by analysts

NuVola already has an impressive and growing number of proof cases illustrating the value of using a private cloud that includes several household names that are using the platform to transform the way they do business. More validation came in August in a research brief from Gartner, where analyst Ross Altman asserted that an appliance approach not only is the way to go, but that this will be proven as application integration and SOA gateway cloud services gain an increasing share of application integration and SOA intermediation revenue (including on-premises appliances and software, as well as cloud-based services).

Fujitsu, which happens to be the world’s third largest IT professional services organization if not yet an IT short list topper in the U.S. (but watch out), is building data centers in strategic locations in the U.S. and Canada to be close to customers who gently wish to test the waters. 

Going back to my list of criteria, the searchable/actionable and security items are already or soon will be table stakes for playing. What makes NuVola something different and something to consider are the ability to use the appliance approach to construct a utilitization platform that delivers real value, and the Lego-like ability to build as you need it/pay-as-you-grow, and shape the cloud to meet specific needs. As Herring iterated several times, “We want to give our customers the performance they need today and tomorrow, as well as the peace of mind that their needs come first.”

No cloud implementation, beit public, private or hybrid, can be all things to all enterprises, their end users and ecosystem partners. However, having a platform that is high-performance, secure, extensible and adaptable, with a road map forward, while not a silver lining is certainly a good place to start.