OREANDA-NEWS. June 08, 2011. Fujitsu has announced in the UK a new top end version of its highly successful enterprise-class Cloud service. The company is now offering IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) Cloud services using “twinned UK data centres”, providing even higher levels of reliability, security and performance to both existing and new customers. This major upgrade provides customers with the service levels they need to feel confident in putting their business critical applications into the Cloud.

This latest Cloud service upgrade means that customers can now use Fujitsu’s IaaS to host applications for critical business processes without past concerns about the safety of moving such applications into the Cloud. These include frontline services which are essential to the day-to-day operations of an organisation, such as the ability to process customer sales and place orders with suppliers.

Fujitsu also offers organisations the assurance that their disc-based storage systems will deliver on the highest business continuity and data integrity requirements, while eliminating performance and bandwidth bottlenecks. Importantly, ETERNUS systems are efficient in energy consumption, minimise floor space and simplify management, while delivering the flexibility for future capacity growth.nexpected growth that will occur in a fully digitised society.

Launched in November 2009, Fujitsu was the first IT services company in the UK to provide a dedicated IaaS offering for enterprise organisations. The updates announced today ensure that Fujitsu’s IaaS service continues to lead the market by extending the use of Cloud for key business systems.

Darren Ratcliffe, service offering manager, Cloud Platforms & Data Centre Managed Services, Fujitsu UK & Ireland, said “It is now safe to host business critical applications in the Cloud and IT directors can now confidently move all their applications into Fujitsu’s trusted Cloud. In the last 6 months alone, we have seen considerable growth in demand for Cloud services from UK enterprises and have increased the size of the Fujitsu UK Cloud services by 400%.”

Ratcliffe continues, “Cloud is evolving fast, organisations need to avoid lock-in and choose a service provider who is committed to continuous innovation and development of Cloud services to meet their business needs. With this high specification extension to the IaaS range of Cloud services we have demonstrated that Fujitsu is dedicated to meet the needs of even the most mission critical systems.”

This new high specification service is actively being adopted by Fujitsu’s customers. Mitchells & Butlers business applications will be moved onto the new IaaS platform as part of its IT Outsource agreement with Fujitsu.

Key features of Fujitsu’s enhanced Cloud offering include:
Reliability

99.999% availability is achieved through twinned Cloud data centres sufficiently far apart to satisfy Financial Services regulations and close enough for low latency replication of data
Each Cloud centre has Tier III reliability and uses enterprise class IT servers, storage and networking to deliver a high availability infrastructure for critical business applications
Security

Data centre facilities are ISO27001 certified
New “Reserved” option for sole use of physical servers
Logical security through Type 1, 2 ,3 Firewalls
Secure MPLS network connection or VPN over Internet
Cloud managed in Fujitsu’s own UK-based data centres - business information is not exported out of the UK jurisdiction, ensuring that Fujitsu customers have complete legal control over their data
Physical data centre security with electric fences, 100% CCTV, 365x24hr security guards
High Performance

High performance IT infrastructure located in Fujitsu’s UK data centres with dedicated Fujitsu Cloud Connect MPLS network and acceleration means no “cloud delay” for IT users

Fujitsu’s customers can also utilise the Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform – a recently launched self-service Cloud platform.