Monthly Archives: October 2016

Revolution causes disruption in information technology

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Most people we know are busy with all the usual stuff of daily life – unaware there is a huge revolution going on.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is right now.

The increasing fusion of the physical and digital worlds at the heart of this revolution can be seen in connected cars, smart homes, increasing types of intelligent devices, growing numbers of sensors, and so on.

This revolution is not a change, it’s a disruption.

In the midst of this disruption, data centres, although still collecting and processing more data than ever, are becoming defined not by hardware, but by software. But they must still have the right hardware. When it comes to computing power, the agile aggregation of performance is vital.

In agile aggregation, development is not linear, with one end result, but happens by advances, stage by stage, all the time. Managers and leaders also need accurate and quick information, and agile business intelligence gives them what they need.

The upshot? Today’s data centres work best with all-modular, virtualised industry-standard servers. Just as well, as new models of data storage are critical to riding out any disruption.

As all-flash arrays become the default option in IT storage, Fujitsu are launching a new era with our flash-first model, with SolidFire and Netapp.

This all-flash array is a solid state storage disk system, meaning it has multiple flash memory drives instead of spinning disk drives. It has no moving parts and can transfer data much faster than traditional electro-mechanical disk drives.

Software-defined systems meet the almost unimaginable demands of hyper-scale storage.

High density will be a feature of servers in hyper-scale setups, saving money and cutting costs. SolidFire is all-modular, so it can meet the needs of small business, yet has hyper-scale functionality, so it can deal with huge demands.

SolidFire also:

  • reduces power consumption
  • increases the dissipation of heat, and
  • offers extreme flexibility and dynamism in network connectivity.

SolidFire’s scale-out architecture, Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities and hardware compatibility-guarantee give our customers what they need. These include:

Scale out: From tens of terabytes to multiple petabytes. Non-disruptive, no downtime scaling.

Complete automation: Comprehensive application programme interfaces and cloud-based monitoring. Instant provisioning. Automatic data distribution and load balancing.

Guaranteed Quality of Service: Independent control of storage performance and capacity. Real-time performance management. Fine-grain QoS settings (faster transactions).

Data assurance: 256-bit encryption at rest. Self-healing drive and node rebuilds. Rapid, space-efficient snapshots and clones. Real-time replication.

Global efficiencies: Inline and post-process compression. Always-on de-duplication (eliminating unnecessary information). No performance impact. Global thin provisioning (total user capacity allocated only as virtual storage; actual physical disk capacity allocated as and when needed).

To learn more about using SolidFire and being ready for the Fourth Industrial Revolution disruption, check out this white paper.

Acceleration of IT breakthroughs surprises businesses

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It could be argued that the Third Industrial Revolution is over and we are embarking on the fourth. This is supported by the velocity, scope and impact of current IT breakthroughs.

Global CEOs and senior business executives say that the acceleration of innovation and the speed of disruption are hard to understand or anticipate and are a source of constant surprise (responding to the Fourth Industrial Revolution).

Recently the World Economic Forum identified six software and services megatrends:

  • Technologies that are worn or implanted, allowing people to interact with objects and each other in new ways.
  • Rapid decline in the size and cost of computing and connectivity, and availability everywhere of storage.
  • Smaller, cheaper and smarter sensors virtually everywhere.
  • Rapid advances in the ability of software to learn and evolve, built on the rise of Big Data for decision-making, and the influence of artificial intelligence and robotics on decision-making and jobs.
  • The internet driving a shift towards networks and platform-based social and economic models. The blockchain, for example, allows competitors to share a tamper-proof digital ledger without a need for a central authority.
  • Physical objects being “printed” from raw materials (six megatrends).

You can see that the common element of the megatrends is digitalisation and that fast and efficient data centres will play an important role in enabling these emerging technologies. I would like to assure you that Fujitsu is ready.  For example, our new digital business platform, MetaArc, incorporates the latest technology for The Cloud, mobile, Big Data and the Internet of Things to integrate and orchestrate the delivery of diverse IT workloads (Fujitsu MetaArc).

We can deliver a ‘next generation’ data centre leveraging among other things, the Solidfire flash-only storage solution. This offers ground-breaking architecture, blazing speed, unprecedented automation and can be expanded live without affecting clients.

Access to technology is going to spread like wildfire as costs keep falling. Already billions of people and things are connected by mobile devices all generating data and in addition, radical innovation is taking place and more rapidly.

Business models in all industries will be shaken up. Existing IT systems will struggle to cope, unless enterprises upgrade in time. For example, an estimated 90 percent of the world’s data has been created in the past two years, and the amount of information created by businesses is doubling every 1.2 years (technology and deep shift tipping points).

A comparison between traditional legacy IT infrastructure and NGDC shows the superiority of Solidfire: Single tenant v. multi-tenant; isolated workloads v. mixed workloads; dedicated infrastructure v. shared infrastructure; scale-up v. scale-out (performance maintained); pre-arranged extra capacity v. capacity on demand; hardware-defined v. software defined; project-based v. self-service; and manual administration v. automation.

Working with NetApp we have created an interesting Infographic that sets the scene for the Fourth Industrial Revolution with a view to how you can prepare your data centre for the future with Solidfire.  Download the infographic to find out more.

Healthy Cloud Strategy, Healthy Business! Measure your wellbeing on the cloud maturity index today.

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CloudSelf-assessment allows organisations to measure the health of their cloud strategy against best practice and similar entities.

When it comes to digital transformation, cloud computing is the first step on the journey, and organisations are faced with a multitude of options and directions to take. With support from Microsoft, Fujitsu has developed a self-assessment tool to help organisations to measure the ‘health and maturity’ of their cloud strategy when compared to established best practice and a benchmark of similar entities.

Participants in the Cloud Maturity Index can take a short self-assessment that is based on the Open Data Centre Alliance’s Cloud Maturity Model. At the completion of the survey they will get a reading on where they sit in terms of their overall ‘Cloud Maturity Index’.

The output from the self-assessment can be valuable for use in future planning and development of ICT strategy.

The first 90 respondents will also receive a customised report that analyses their current cloud state and provides recommendations to support the development of a balanced cloud strategy and roadmap. The report will be compiled by the independent research firm Capitalis.

This self-assessment is accessible by clicking here and will only take approximately 7 minutes to complete.

For more information about the Open Data Centre Alliance’s Cloud Maturity Model see: https://opendatacenteralliance.org

 

Fujitsu is set to showcase latest global innovations at ITS World Congress 2016.

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Fujitsu is exhibiting at this year’s ITS World Congress, which is being held in Melbourne’s convention and exhibition centre from Monday 10th – Friday 14th October 2016. The overall theme of this year’s congress is ‘ITS – Enhancing Liveable Cities and Communities’ with an expected number of visitors estimated at 7,000. Fujitsu will be located at booth number 709, which will be situated within the Japan Pavilion.

Specifically Fujitsu will be focusing the offerings exhibited around the theme of ‘Human Centric Innovation – Driving Liveable Society’. Over the duration of the 5 days, there will be a number of exhibitions, vision introductions and physical demonstrations provided by Fujitsu. The three key areas of exhibition include; Drive Recorder ‘G500’ Series, which is based around collecting vehicle information. SPATIOWL which focuses on location based services for public and private transport and Mobility IoT Platform, which is the service platform to provide mobility related services.

There will also be a host of ground breaking demonstrations of this latest technology, with some of the most exciting being a driver drowsiness detector, safer driver and driver monitoring and real time dynamic map updates, to name a few.

Fujitsu would like to encourage anyone attending the event over the coming days to visit the exhibition within the Japan Pavilion and speak to a friendly industry expert who will be on hand to assist with any questions you may have or further information that may be required.

 

The Fourth Industrial Revolution will test your IT systems

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blogEarlier this year, the Pokémon Go smartphone game quickly captured worldwide attention. But the most compelling point about the game is that it blurred boundaries between the real and the virtual, as millions of people everywhere tried to track down virtual-world characters.

This is a sign of how the world is not just rapidly changing, but being reshaped. And the reshaping has a name: The Fourth Industrial Revolution.  The first three industrial revolutions were founded, respectively, on mechanical power, electricity, and electronics and information technology.

The fourth is characterised by a merging of technologies that blurs the boundaries between the physical, digital and biological worlds.  Billions of people are being connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented access to knowledge, processing power and storage.

In any major revolution, change is a universal constant. The sheer rate of change, or disruption, we are experiencing now is creating a world that is being reshaped faster than individuals and institutions can respond. This is why enterprises will have to be more focused than ever to keep up with developments in hardware and software, or very quickly fall behind.

Fujitsu is ready for this increased rate of change and we have a number of technologies in place to handle it.  One such technology is a platform called Solidfire, which we believe is the definitive all-flash storage system for the next-generation data centre.  Its massive scalability and inherent deep automation capabilities means this technology can predictably run thousands of mixed workload applications from a single shared system.

In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, change is driven by the Cloud, the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence. Businesses will operate according to four design principles:

Inter-operability: Machines, devices, sensors and people will communicate with each other via the Internet of Things, or the Internet of People, and by 2020, the number of internet-connected things will exceed 50 billion.

Information transparency: Information systems will use data from sensors to create virtual copies of selected parts of the physical world.

Technical assistance: Assistance systems will collect and visualise vast quantities of information for human decision-making and problem-solving, and cyber-physical systems will carry out tasks that we find unpleasant, exhausting, or unsafe.

Decentralised decision-making: Cyber-physical systems will make decisions and perform many tasks on their own (Fourth Industrial Revolution).

The traditional data centre wasn’t built for the Fourth Industrial Revolution so we will need a leap in orders of magnitude in IT and computing, like the SolidFire all-flash array, to give us the next-generation data centre and Fast IT. This solution:

  • can increase capacity and performance on demand, without downtime
  • delivers guaranteed performance to multiple different workloads
  • is programmable and automated
  • can continue even if something fails, without application re-configuration
  • enables better utilisation of server platforms, networks, storage protocols and people.

If pictures are your thing – download this Infographic on how to harness the potential of the Fourth Industrial Revolution with Solidfire.