Abstracts of Magazine FUJITSU 2010-5 (VOL. 61, NO. 3)

Special Issue: Next-Generation Data Center for the Cloud Era

• Grand Design for Next-Generation Data Centers

Along with changes in customers' businesses and social environments, there has been an evolution in the roles and capabilities that data centers should have. They play an increasingly important role because of the emergence of Cloud computing models and the expansion of IT for addressing major social challenges including the falling birthrate and aging population and environmental issues. The capabilities they require are also becoming more sophisticated in all fields such as advanced IT, data analysis and operation technologies, risk and security management and environmental measures, in addition to serving as facilities relating to technologies and know-how. In the future, utilization of these kinds of consolidated assets and their timely update and development according to changes in social environment will become important activities. This paper discusses Fujitsu's latest activities accompanying the new roles and capabilities of data centers and the ideal type of data center to aim at in future.

• Service Value Maximization with Evolving Operational Service Platform

Fujitsu's data centers have a framework called an operational service platform at the core of customers' IT system operations. It provides the high-value-added operational services of security, safety and stability centered on humans and technology. It consists of human-technology collaboration and know-how, including a system monitoring function, in which the center operator constantly monitors the entire IT system for the customer, and also implements operations required for maintenance and failure recovery. In today's severe economic environment, there has been an increasing sense of disparity between the value provided by services and the value that customers recognize and demand. Customers want to use operational services that are higher-value-added and cheaper than ever. With the opening of the Tatebayashi System Center's new annex, we formulated a concept of a next-generation operational service platform to address these demands. This paper presents that overall concept and gives details of Fujitsu's specific activities for it.

• IT Infrastructure of Data Center Services Based on ITIL® (ITIL® is a Registered Trade Mark of AXELOS Limited)

Fujitsu's data center services have been received favorably by customers and are growing steadily. As customers' businesses become more dependent on IT, however, their demands have increased and diversified to include a higher quality of service, enhanced security and support for internal control. In addition, now that the reduction of IT costs has become a key challenge for customers, they have higher expectations for data center services as a means of reducing operational costs, which account for 70% of their IT-related costs, and there are the conflicting demands of a better service level and lower cost services. This paper presents the improvement and standardization of service processes based on ITIL® that we have worked on to address the above-mentioned challenges. It also covers the establishment of a new service infrastructure to assist with and manage the reliable implementation of standardized processes.

• Trends of Energy Saving in Data Centers and Fujitsu Group's Approach

Tackling global environmental issues is a major challenge for IT companies. The Fujitsu Group considers it an IT company's responsibility not only to work on reducing the CO₂emitted from its plants, but also to help reduce the CO₂ generated by IT devices through their own energy-saving measures, and to utilize IT to reduce CO₂ in all fields of society. The greater volume of information used by the Internet has unavoidably led to data centers consuming more power. Therefore, data centers must become more energy efficient to reduce the burden that the whole of society places on the environment. The Fujitsu Group has introduced a number of technologies to improve energy efficiency at data centers. These include technologies to conserve energy at its facilities such as efficient air conditioning, lighting and power supplies, as well as energy-saving IT devices including servers, and technologies to integrate and virtualize IT infrastructure.

• Technology for Constructing Environmentally Friendly Data Centers and Fujitsu's Approach

In recent years, IT devices such as servers have come to have high performance and be highly integrated and their processing performance has greatly improved. Because of that, they are consuming more power and emitting more heat. It should be noted that there is an increase not only in the energy needed to power high density racks, but also in the energy needed used to cool them. Against this background, Fujitsu has developed an overall framework of technology for constructing environmentally friendly data centers. Based on this framework, Fujitsu is promoting technological development and application. In this paper, we overview our technology and introduce our approach in the new annex of Tatebayashi System Center.

• Construction Technology Used for New Annex of Tatebayashi System Center

For data centers, consideration for the environment as well as ensuring functionality, performance and safety have become important themes in recent years. The new annex of the Tatebayashi System Center, which was planned as a next-generation data center, was built using the latest technology introduced in relation to those themes. From the viewpoint of safety and consideration for the environment relating to construction, this paper presents the recent trends and construction technology used in building the new annex of the Tatebayashi System Center.

• Optimization of IT Load and Facility Energy in Data Centers

While the convenience of data centers is attracting attention and demand for them is increasing, so the amount of energy they consume have been increasing. This is because they use an increased amount of electricity and require greater air-conditioning to cool server rooms due to the increased load of the IT devices installed there. To reduce such energy consumption, there are needs for energy-saving measures and the ratio of facility energy to IT load of server rooms needs to be optimized. Aiming to implement these measures, Fujitsu has developed an energy-saving operation management system and introduced it in the new annex of the Tatebayashi System Center to conduct detailed monitoring (visualization) on electric power, temperature and wind velocity in relation to IT load, and thereby computerize efficient methods of operation to optimize facility energy. This paper presents the characteristic functions of and future outlook for this energy-saving operation management system.

• Environmentally Friendly Energy-saving Air-conditioning System

Amid the recession, it is said that business operators will tend to outsource more and more so that they can gather their IT resources in one place, improve their efficiency and reduce their costs. Data centers are at the heart of this outsourcing, and they consume a large amount of electricity. They need to use electricity safely and efficiently. Against this social background, a new annex of Tatebayashi System Center has implemented an energy-saving air-conditioning system as a measure to try to reduce its environmental impact. This paper introduces an outline of this measure to optimize air-conditioning implemented in the server room, based on the cooling method for greening that has been newly introduced this time. In addition, it introduces the effect of the measure that makes the best use of the advantages of scale at the data center.

• Highly Secure and User-friendly Physical Security for Tatebayashi System Center

With the rapid progress of IT, more servers are being used in the information systems divisions of enterprises or the government and other public offices. Consequently, they need to have facilities, countermeasures against natural disasters and security measures in order to ensure stable operation of these servers. However, an enormous cost will be involved if they acquire facilities on their own, such as a secure power supply and air-conditioning for use in the event of disasters such as earthquakes and fires, and tight security measures. Therefore, there is increasing demand for data center services in many industries, and the data center market has been expanding recently. To ensure its competitiveness in this market, Fujitsu's system center is making efforts for physical security measures to keep customers' IT assets safe. This paper presents the most advanced physical security in the Tatebayashi System Center new annex, which was opened in November 2009.

• Security Architectures for Cloud Computing

Cloud computing made things more convenient for computer users. However, it also gave rise to new security problems such as fears about safety and reliability. To solve this, service providers need to establish security architecture services for Cloud computing. This paper firstly introduces domestic and international trends in the security requirements of Cloud computing. In addition, it explains Fujitsu's security architecture for Cloud computing that meets various security requirements such as access control, authentication and ID management, and security visualization.

• Network Platform for Next-Generation Data Centers

Data centers need to rapidly deploy IT systems to react to rapid changes in the customers' business environments. At the same time, data centers must comprehend how the facility equipment is using energy in order to reduce energy consumption and save on power costs. To meet these requirements, Fujitsu has introduced two network platforms that are suitable for next-generation data centers in the Tatebayashi System Center's new annex. One is an optical network infrastructure for customers utilizing the technology used in wide-area Ethernet services, and the other is an environmental monitoring sensor network for facility management using ad hoc technology. This paper presents the aim and effect of introducing these two network platforms and describes their future outlook.

• Service Oriented Platform

Fujitsu is developing the service-oriented platform (SOP) which is applied as an infrastructure for emerging Cloud services. SOP is a huge complex of servers, storage systems, network and software and is optimized for Cloud services. SOP features integration of various virtualization technologies and system management technologies. This paper describes the design goal of SOP and the concept behind its architecture that is to be used to achieve those goals. This includes its server-centric virtualization (ScV) that enables self-serve and automatic deployment of user application systems, and evolution-oriented architecture (EoA) that enables extension and update of data center infrastructure without service suspension. The key technologies such as virtual system packages, dynamic resource management, and operation management are also explained.

• On-demand Virtual System Service

Cloud computing allows ICT capability to be used via a network. Enterprises are beginning to widely use it as an effective way to reduce prior investments and allow active use of ICT. IaaS is a type of Cloud service that allows many enterprises, regardless of their size, to utilize a virtual machine, virtual storage and virtual network when they need to. It is classified into three types by its features: public, virtual private and private. Fujitsu provides IaaS as the on-demand virtual system service which is optimized for enterprise-use owing to its easy configuration, on-demand and self-service concepts. It allows customers to utilize ICT resources along with business strategies and liberate applications from the hardware life cycle. One challenge is how to acquire application development technique that is appropriate for virtualization and decentralized processing. When enterprise ICT systems expand to partners and customers, a Cloud service will become indispensable.

• Fujitsu's Efforts for SaaS Platform (PaaS)

SaaS has been developed with the focus on generalized software, but recently its scope has been widening to industrial applications. In some cases, in addition to SaaS for non-routine tasks installed already, it is being used for mission-critical tasks installed individually with SI. Meanwhile, investment in corporate information systems is beginning to show signs of recovery. However, corporations that use SaaS are finding it hard to have a long-term vision, so they consider what to invest in based on the belief that they need small and agile development or in-house design, development and operation for system architecture that is less affected by external factors. At the same time, customers' expectations for services of providers are changing from simple provision of functions to a structure that contributes to their business performance. This paper describes Fujitsu's activities, future direction and services for changing market demand, with case examples.

• Efforts for Next-Generation Outsourcing Services for Data Centers

Traditional outsourcing services for data centers, such as housing services and hosting services, are easily affected by the physical constraints and human resource constraints of the data centers, because they must assign dedicated IT resources and operators. Thus, the services had problems such as long lead times and difficulties in signing short-term contracts. Therefore we focused on research and development for a next-generation outsourcing service for data centers, applying technologies for virtualization and autonomy. This will enable us to provide faster, lower cost and more flexible outsourcing services for data centers to customers. This paper describes case examples of an on-demand hosting service and organic storage service, which are next-generation outsourcing services for data centers that we have made available to our existing customers.

• Cloud Computing Applied for Agriculture and Other Fields

Japanese farmers today use IT systems to declare tax or for traceability management, as required by people in the government or distribution industry who are non-farmers. With this situation in mind, the authors have focused on introducing the latest technologies (sensors, wireless networks and Cloud computing), radically revising approaches to agriculture and conducting business feasibility studies to make a hypothesis model of Cloud services that truly contribute to agriculture, and have conducted a demonstrative test with the cooperation of two farming corporations in Japan. This model has much in common with on-site operations such as medical and nursing care and maintenance in addition to agriculture, and activities are under way with a view to putting the model to wider use. Based on the knowledge acquired through actual agricultural operations and subsequent analysis, this paper describes the affinity between agriculture and Cloud computing and discusses applying the technologies used in the demonstrative test to other fields.