ITWire

Mike Foster, Fujitsu’s ceo who is currently visiting Western Australia, said that there was a strong business case for a WA based cloud – partly to meet the needs of clients in that state, but also to step up business continuity capability. Mr Foster said that if the business case stacked up, there was no reason why more instances of Fujitsu’s local cloud might not be launched in the future.

He said that having a second cloud instance in Australia was increasingly important to existing users. Mr Foster said that a manufacturing and transportation business using cloud services delivered out of Fujitsu’s two Sydney data centres had specified that it wanted disaster recovery capabilities located at least 500 km away from the primary cloud site in order to reduce risk.

According to Fujitsu the new instance of the cloud should also address Western Australia customer concerns regarding latency for applications which would otherwise be run out of an Eastern Seaboard data centre.

For most organisations however latency issues across the Nullarbor aren’t really that much of a problem.

In 2010 Perth based Curtin University announced that it had deliberately selected an Optus cloud service based in a data centre in NSW in order to explore the issues associated with latency and bandwidth. It turned out to be not much of an issue at all.

Earlier this week Ninefold, a cloud storage provider owned by Sydney based Macquarie Telecom, also announced that it was extending its programme of making storage available for free to start-ups based in the Eastern States to WA.

Mr Foster said that although Fujitsu itself did not think latency had been a major problem, there had been a customer perception that it was. “Early on we missed out on a couple of deals because of the issue of latency,” he told iTWire.