Fujitsu hooks local cloud into global network

Beverley Head
Sunday, 27 February 2011 17:52

Business IT - Networking

Australia will be the first geography outside of Japan to link Fujitsu's local cloud services into the company's emerging global cloud. This is intended by the end of the year to hook together the company's Tier III data centres in four separate geographies and provide commoditised cloud services to customers around the world.

It currently has two organisations in Australia piloting the global cloud service which is initially being offered as an Infrastructure as a Service offering.

Fujitsu's existing local cloud which was announced a year ago and now has a number of users including CA Technologies, Frucor Beverages and Toyota, is operated out of two data centres in Sydney. One of these has now been connected to Fujitsu's data centres in Japan to provide users with access to the global cloud.

Data centres in Singapore, the UK, US and Germany will also be brought into Fujitsu's global cloud before the end of the year.

Announcing the global cloud initiative at the Kickstart 11 conference in Queensland, Cameron McNaught, Fujitsu's group executive director solutions and cloud services, said that ultimately there were plans to hook in other Fujitsu data centres in Australia to the cloud. At present only the Sydney data centres underpin the company's local cloud, and only one of them is part of the global cloud.

Asked about the issue of latency for customers based across the country, in Perth for example, where a mining company has signed on for cloud services, Mr McNaught said that had not yet been a problem.

However he said that from April Fujitsu would offer a service using Riverbed's Wan optimisation tools to allow users to manage network traffic on the cloud in order to minimise any latency issues.