Fujitsu’s new hybrid implementation of Microsoft Windows Azure could address corporate concerns about deploying global workloads on Microsoft’s public cloud.
As more companies consider moving applications and data to the cloud, compliance and regulatory issues often direct them away from public cloud implementations in general. Germany’s data privacy laws, which treat data about German citizens differently from other data a cloud might host, are an example of these restrictions.
With its new offering, Hybrid Cloud Services for Microsoft Windows Azure, Fujitsu can use its global presence to make sure that data stays within prescribed areas, said Jeff Stucker, Fujitsu’s Microsoft alliance manager. And, because Fujitsu fields both Azure and non-Azure-based clouds, it can help companies run new workloads in Azure and legacy applications in other Windows-based hosted environments.
“For customers doing cutting-edge technology, especially on the Microsoft stack, the platform capabilities of Windows Azure are perfect but not all workloads are a great fit,” Stucker said.
Traditional, legacy applications like ERP need to run in non-Azure environments, and Fujitsu runs a variety of hosted platforms that will let those legacy applications run where they should and link them as needed to Azure-based applications. “Someone needs to bring that all together,” Stucker said.
Fujitsu is launching the hybrid services now in the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Spain and Canada with other regions to follow
In July, 2010, Microsoft brought Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Fujitsu together at its Worldwide Partner Conference to bless Azure. They all promised to launch Azure-based data centers within a year. But of those three, only Fujitsu delivered, launching its public Azure cloud in August. Those companies also said at the time their work implementing Azure would result in an Azure appliance implementation that would allow customers to eventually run Azure in-house. That Azure appliance is not yet available either.
In the meantime, both Dell and HP have also pledged to build OpenStack based clouds and Dell actually launched a VMware-based cloud.
Some rights reserved by Carlos Gutiérrez G.
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