SYSTEMS

By Steve Fisher, Editor in Chief -- Fujitsu Technology Solutions, Inc., today launched a new global storage brand the company is calling ETERNUS. The new brand incorporates the best and brightest of the enterprise storage systems, software and services from Fujitsu Limited and its partners. Along with the news of ETERNUS Fujitsu also announced significant enhancements to its storage product line. “Eternus is a part of a global branding initiative on the part of the Fujitsu group of companies,” said Wayne Giroux, director of storage marketing, Fujitsu Technology Solutions. “What you can think of when you think of Eternus is, it is not a product per se, it’s an umbrella branding under which we are bringing storage solutions to the marketplace…It gives us a very complete set of offerings in order to be able to address the challenges and obstacles that people are struggling with in the industry.” The ETERNUS storage solutions are complemented by offerings from partners such as Brocade, VERITAS, Microsoft, and Oracle. The result is complete solutions built on industry-leading products. One aspect that will be a real benefit for end-users is Fujitsu’s multi-vendor, multi-platform, integrated approach. The open nature of the solutions will make life easier for any IT person dealing day to day with a variety of disparate systems. A large number of heterogeneous high-end systems can not only have access to a single Fujitsu storage product, but can also be easily managed. Allocating storage resources to one application or another or one server or another, or even one group of servers is apparently quite an easy thing to do. Fujitsu's ETERNUS GR storage systems, now feature 18-GByte and 36-GByte drives that run at 15,000 RPMs -- the fastest supported in the storage industry today. The company also provides 73-GByte drives. The systems are also now equipped with advanced connectivity that allows 48 100MB/second fibre channels that directly connect to servers. Also, all servers attached to the ETERNUS GR storage systems can access any device in the storage pool, while ensuring complete failover and fault tolerance. Fujitsu Technology Solutions, Inc. is also introducing advancements in data protection and management in its SystemWalker/StorageMGR Web-based replication and SAN management software including: Expanded capability to support a multi-vendor environment; Support for fibre channel over IP wide area network (WAN) configurations; and Support for storage management in high availability clustering environments. ETERNUS GR Storage features data replication facilities that provide centralized, near instantaneous back-up and fast recovery operations. It includes One Point Copy and Equivalent Copy for replication and mirroring, and is able to suspend and resume Oracle and SQL databases while the applications are running 24x7x365. “Within North America and Europe, NTSI has a complete services arm both for project services and for product and installation & support services including multi-vendor support,” Giroux continued. “So we have all of the tools, we have the relationships with other Fujitsu group companies, but one of the keys [to success] is to bring all of those things to bear and to be able to find the right technique or the right thing for our customer to solve his/her problem. We’re dedicated to doing this.” In terms of storage, Fujitsu has been very successful in the Asian marketplace where they have something on the order of 3000 systems installed. Whether they are at the absolute top of the Asian markets I’ll leave to the analysts, but they are certainly very near the top alongside Hitachi, EMC and perhaps one or two other companies. They have not historically been huge in North America. I think that basically what Fujitsu has done with the ETERNUS brand, philosophy, what you will, is they have brought their GR storage offerings to North America to go after their piece of an obviously highly lucrative storage pie. Will Fujitsu be successful? Time will tell. I will say this though. I found the whole ETERNUS launch to be refreshing in a way. I see a lot of product launches and news releases about the latest and greatest in storage (and other technologies) screaming “Our widgets are the biggest! Our widgets are the fastest!” and that’s about it. With the ETERNUS initiative I think Fujitsu is stating quite clearly that it understands that if you are going to address storage management issues and be successful then you have to show up with a combination of expertise, service, tools and technology. A complete solution. Cool technology alone is just not enough.