Fujitsu Upgrades Kawaijuku's System Platform To Public Cloud

Tokyo, January 17, 2012

Fujitsu today announced that it has upgraded the systems platform of Kawaijuku Educational Institution by shifting it to the FGCP/S5 public cloud platform. The system is initially used to assess a student's probability of passing college entrance exams. After students take the National Center Test for University Admissions (the "Center Test"), they can enter their scores into this system to estimate their probability of passing using Kawaijuku's know-how and accumulated data. Kawaijuku will use the new system to offer a College Admittance Probability Assessment service beginning January 18, 2012.

Fujitsu's secure and reliable cloud environment makes operations of Kawaijuku's College Admittance Probability Assessment system stable and efficient, improves operational continuity (to counter natural disasters and security threats), and reduces total operating costs by 22%.

In the past, building a system of similar scale would take a period of some three months; however, this system was completed in merely one month since they started the design. As there is always a rush to access the College Admittance Probability Assessment system immediately after the Center Test, the fact that the system now runs on the FGCP/S5's metered pricing system enables Kawaijuku to only pay for the resources it needs, when it needs them, thus allowing them to optimize their use of ICT resources and their ICT investment.

Background

Kawaijuku makes its College Admittance Probability Assessment system available to test-takers starting three days after the Center Test to up until the end of March. The system only operates for a limited duration. Of that time period, most traffic occurs during the first week, making it a variable-demand system. To offer this service, Kawaijuku has, in the past, rented 30 servers located in Nagoya datacenter and Tokyo office, set up their system environment, launched the service, run the service, shut down the service, decommissioned the system, and returned the servers.

Deployment Results

By building the College Admittance Probability Assessment system within Fujitsu's FGCP/S5 cloud platform, Kawaijuku avoids the need to temporarily operate rental servers. As their use of the cloud is on a metered-payment basis, resources can be allocated efficiently in response to traffic. The platform is set up so that Kawaijuku can use a portal-site menu to build and revise their system, monitor utilization rates, activate and deactivate virtual machines, run backup and restore tasks, and perform other operations, all remotely. To ensure reliability and business continuity that will stand up to use as the company's core system, the platform includes robust disaster-response and security measures. By selecting a public cloud, which is able to provision system platforms in a short period of time, system conversions to cloud took only one month, quickly improving operational efficiency.

Future Plans

Kawaijuku is looking at other ways beyond the College Admittance Probability Assessment system to efficiently use high-reliability ICT resources and increase their business continuity. For its part, Fujitsu looks forward to working together with Kawaijuku to support their business and help find ways for them to use ICT for added value.

About the FGCP/S5 Public Cloud Service

This public cloud service for businesses is a cloud platform that brings together a wide range of Fujitsu Group technologies, including servers, storage, networking, middleware, and service management. The Japan-based system is the first of its kind to be available worldwide. It is available on an on-demand basis over the Internet from Fujitsu's own datacenters, and uses servers, storage, and other virtualized ICT infrastructure to suit the customer's purposes. It maintains a level of reliability to stand up to use as a company's mission-critical system.

Customers using this service have access to the ICT systems they need, when they need them, without the need to set up any special ICT systems in advance, greatly reducing costs in the end.