Fujitsu releases Dynamic Cube and aims for place at top IT table

Work has continued
apace within Fujitsu since its separation from Siemens at the beginning of
April. The new structure, which absorbed the former Fujitsu Siemens (FSC) EMEA
operations, is aimed at being far more global while new products are appearing
which fit into this.

For instance, around
the time of the official separation, Fujitsu’s ServerView Resource Coordinator
(Virtual Edition) was released to unify and simplify physical and virtual
server management. This week saw the release of the PRIMERGY BX800 as a
foundational part of its new, green Dynamic Server Infrastructure approach (more
of which in a moment).

Yet these
announcements are little more than peeps around the curtain of what is in progress—which is to raise the Fujitsu profile so it can sit alongside IBM and HP in the minds of IT-buying
companies as one of the three leading global IT infrastructure management
companies.

Fujitsu is pretty
sizable, with around 170,000 people and a turnover in the year to March of
around $47Bn. But visibility for Fujitsu in the global market—with consistent
global branding—will be a major challenge. Up to now the various regions have
been pretty autonomous, with the FSC brand a prime example. So I will be
watching developments this year with interest.

For instance, most
immediately, the new PRIMERGY BX900 Dynamic Cube blade server system is one
of the foundation building blocks for its planned global growth in x86 servers.
“Dynamic” comes from its ‘Cool-safe’ branded dynamic power and cooling system to reduce energy costs, dynamic virtualisation as well as using
the latest Intel Xeon 5500 processors to improve operational performance, dynamic high availability to boost
uptime and dynamic scalability
through a new system architecture to help protect infrastructure investment.

All of this is in
a single blade cube which allows customers greater agility and reduced costs by
adapting dynamically when usage
changes. High availability is achieved through full redundancy with every
component hot-swappable with software-managed hardware failover. The stackable
design allows up to an industry-leading 18 blades in a 10U chassis. Large
memory capacity and leading I-O performance complete the picture.

By viewing a
little more detail, the picture looks to me more impressive. The 18 blades
each have two sockets and four cores, so a total of 144 cores in the 10U
chassis. There are 18×18 DIMMs each with 8GB, so 2,592GB (/2.592PB) maximum
memory, and 18×16 lanes @ 22Gb/s to give 6400Gb/s mid-plane bandwidth. It supports
14.4TB of direct attached storage (DAS) comprising 6×4 SX hard disk drives
(HDDs), 12×2 BX HDDs and one 300GB.

This should certainly cause potential customers and vendors alike to take a closer look—not least IBM and HP because Fujitsu’s
aggressive global target of shipping half a million units next year will probably eat
into their market shares.

What can we expect
next? Stay tuned for further Fujitsu announcements soon.