"With the growth in use of the FUJITSU NetCampus system and its increasing application outside of its original home base of Japan, operational costs and system efficiencies had increased. A new system based on server consolidation using Solaris Containers achieved very effective use of the improved CPU and memory resources. Everything now works well with workload fluctuations smoothed and demands well beyond the capability of the older system being met."

Fujitsu believes that efficient and strategic human resource improvements, underpinned by educational infrastructure are essential in improving business competency. But in achieving this, reduced operational infrastructure costs are also needed to ensure continuous delivery of the related educational services. FUJITSU University, with responsibility for human resource development, has refurbished its Fujitsu Group-wide educational system. The aim was to reduce installation and system administration costs, as well as to upgrade service reliability. The ability to consolidate all services, previously operating on 13 servers, on to just 4 four new servers, also contributed to reductions in environmental impact. Power consumption and resulting CO2 emissions were cut in half and floor space requirements were also significantly reduced.

Contact for this case study

Installation background

FUJITSU NetCampus provides the educational platform that supports 180,000 users in 28 countries

As business environments continue their dramatic change, efficient and strategic human resource development is a key element of business success.

Aiming at improving its customer service quality on a global scale and unifying its business and product values, Fujitsu, in April 2002, established a unified human resource development organization called FUJITSU NetCampus.

FUJITSU NetCampus provides a learning service infrastructure to deliver a variety of education courses, for both self-learning and on-site training. It also provides monitoring services that track employee progress and maintain up-to-date education records. Hodaka Imanishi Director of FUJITSU University Group talks about the four aims of FUJITSU NetCampus.

"The primary purpose of FUJITSU NetCampus was to build a self-improvement platform that employees could use at their own pace. The second purpose was to create the ability to swiftly enhance learning services by integrating the education systems of numerous separate departments. The third purpose was to expand the common learning service to employees worldwide. The fourth purpose was to improve efficiency in the way learning services were delivered. In addition to these specific purposes, FUJITSU NetCampus also presents significant value from a management perspective. On-line training can improve employee competency very quickly, and provides learning opportunities for all employees. In addition, the self-learning approach reduces environmental impact by minimizing the consumption of natural resources. The consumption of paper based training materials and the use of fossil fuels for transportation are both considerably reduced."

Around 180,000 employees in 185 Fujitsu group companies in 28 countries can select a rich variety of training from over 2,254 courses available. These include 902 Japanese self learning courses and 357 internationally available self-learning courses. But after five years of system operation without a major upgrade, the educational system was in need of urgent refurbishing.

Installation Point

Solaris Containers and upgraded resource utilization mean high efficiency

Keisuke Kurita, a principal architect with the FUJITSU NetCampus system, with responsibility for development, migration and administration in the Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory (Fujitsu SSL), talks about the requirements for a new platform.

"FUJITSU NetCampus is used to support compulsory education programs for the entire Fujitsu group. When a large number of employees are undertaking the required self learning courses and must finish by a pre-determined date, we need to ensure stable system operation. To do so, the system platforms must have first-rate reliability that maximizes system operation uptime. There can be no exceptions even for system maintenance time. Cost reductions became another target. We needed to minimize our system administration costs which were approaching a million dollars per year."

Another problem that had to be addressed was the maintenance service for the older systems was soon to expire. To resolve these problems, his team undertook the planning of the new system.

"In reducing server acquisition and maintenance costs, consolidation of the existing servers and upgraded resource utilization were our primary considerations. Another consideration concerned our application assets which were on Solaris servers. To ensure smooth transition to the new system, the system administration procedures needed to stay as close as possible to the former system."

Installation Process

Tests and development environments run side-by side with Solaris Containers

Effects of System Installation

Number of servers reduced 70%,
power consumption and server space by 50%

The project commenced development in Feb. 2008 with four SPARC Enterprise M4000 servers installed in June 2008. The production system went live in Nov. 2008. In the production system, the Web and application systems are load balanced over two of the SPARC Enterprise M4000 servers. The clustered DB system is then supported by the other two SPARC Enterprise M4000 servers.

A high reliability ETERNUS disk storage system, is used for the database back-end, plus SAN Boot (for reduced downtime), and improved manageability. "With all our data and applications stored in the ETERNUS, we had assured reliability of our system assets. In addition the swift data backup capability of ETERNUS One Point Copy(OPC) dramatically reduces required operational downtime," says Mr. Kurita.

The new system delivered improved cost efficiency and lowered environment impact. "With the new system, we have dramatically reduced the number of servers from 13 to 4. This reduction was our key for success. We have also reduced our acquisition costs for hardware and software as well as our maintenance costs. Space and energy efficiency were another success. With the new servers, we have reduced server space by 57% and power consumption by 55%. Power consumption for air conditioning has also reduced accordingly. In addition, server manageability including patch application has also improved." says Mr. Nakano.

Mr. Kurita talks about future enhancements. "Solaris Containers has the ability to flexibly allocate CPU and memory resources. While this feature is not yet used with the current operational system, as we have assured sufficient performance, it is a candidate for future enhancements as we grow. We will see if we will use this function after we have analyzed the performance of Containers."

Mr. Imanishi talks about one aspect of FUJITSU NetCampus enhancement. "We are planning to expand the use of FUJITSU NetCampus. Feedbacks from user surveys and inquiries are creating future enhancement candidates. Another consideration is the offering of a knowledge-base inside Fujitsu departments. For such enhancements, we will need to develop many more applications."

SPARC Enterprise M4000 with its high reliability and secure flexibility is a foundation of Fujitsu infrastructure support, both for its corporate activities and human resources management.

---