Fujitsu gives partners building blocks for development of private cloud business

Fujitsu is presenting its reseller partners with a simple way to build private cloud infrastructures for enterprise customers with its Dynamic Infrastructure Blocks (DI Blocks), which the company plans to start shipping in Q1 next year.

DI Blocks enable a modular, step-by-step approach to consolidating and reshaping data centres, providing the ideal platforms for on-premise private cloud infrastructures. All data centre resources can be automated and orchestrated through a simple yet powerful interface, with server, storage, network and virtualisation resources allocated dynamically, as required. This makes provisioning and management of IT services and applications quick and simple - and optimises performance and return-on-investment for the customer. 

Craig Parker, Head of Product Marketing at Fujitsu, says that DI Blocks will give Fujitsu resellers a distinct offering in the cloud segment and will clearly differentiate them from the competition. "With DI Blocks, our partners will be able to create flexible, future-proof systems that are adaptable and agile. They provide an ideal platform for the deployment of private clouds and their modular scalability means that the IT infrastructure can be shaped to meet customer needs. This is a real departure from the rigid, silo-based approach that has been taken in the past and something that's quite different to what other vendors have to offer in today's market. We believe that DI Blocks give Fujitsu SELECT Partners a very distinct competitive edge in the cloud infrastructure market."

Fujitsu is making training and education resources available to SELECT Partners that want to make DI Blocks a part of their cloud proposition.  As well as providing the essential components for constructing private cloud systems, DI Blocks will also open up more value-added potential for partners, says Parker. "As well as the platform itself, customers are clearly going to need help with deploying, provisioning and securing private clouds and there is a good opportunity to develop consultancy and support services business here too. We'll be working with our partners to help them build those propositions."

Pre-integrated, factory-configured, customised DI Blocks enable enterprises to move towards scale-out private cloud-based computing environments. Total cost of ownership is reduced by improving the overall use of server, storage, software and networking components. IT resources are allocated on-demand, delivering improved productivity by provisioning logical infrastructure environments within minutes.

Using Fujitsu's ServerView Resource Orchestrator software, both physical and virtual components can be dynamically assigned and allocated as needed, giving the administrator control of all system resources. Full integration with both VMware and Microsoft virtualisation solutions is supported 

DI Blocks are dedicated appliances for enterprise virtualisation and private cloud infrastructures. The first set of solutions will be available in early 2012. 

Starting at 48 cores, DI Blocks system configurations scale to more than 1700 Intel Xeon 5600 series cores, with memory of up to almost 21,000GB and disk storage capacities of more than 900TB, requiring 10GB Ethernet or 8GB Fibre Channel networks.