Fujitsu Data Centre Highlights
- Opens a 6-hall data centre north of London
- Uses DRUPS machines to provide resilient power supply
- Achieves a PUE of 1.4 and a DCiE of 73%
Fujitsu UK and Ireland IaaS Highlights
- Offers compute and storage Cloud Computing services
- Focuses on understanding business regulations and compliance
- Allows customers to meet the requirements for data and storage to be held within the UK
- Has an evolutionary approach to Cloud Computing
Fujitsu Opens Europe’s First Certified Tier III Data Centre
Having looked at and reported on HP’s Wynyard and NGD’s Newport facilities earlier, I was very pleased to get an invitation from Fujitsu to visit its new facility north of London. The first in Europe to be built to the Uptime Institute’s Tier III standard, the new data centre is one of Fujitsu’s 85 in the world, 52 in Europe, 9 in the UK and Ireland and 5 in the South-East of England alone. It won awards from Datacenterdynamics in 2008 and 2009 and so I’m sure many readers will already know about it. However I think it’s worth reviewing its features, since they add up to an impressive overall plant.
Steve Weiner conducted our tour around and provided a presentation about this data centre. Key features include:
- 3,688 m2 (40,000 ft2) technical space
- 6 technical data halls
- Positioned to serve all industry sectors with standards to support Financial Services and Government customers in and around London
- The ability of technical halls to attain the UK governments ‘List X’ rating
- The use of Diesel Rotary Uninterruptible Power Supply (DRUPS) machinery
- Maximises advantages of a relatively low outside ambient temperature, reducing the need to run chillers for most of the year
- A Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.4 and a Data Center infrastructure Efficiency of 71% –DCiE measurements were developed by the Green Grid to measure the power efficiency of data centres
For security reasons Fujitsu wouldn’t let me take photographs of the data centre, but the tour revealed the care and attention the company has gone to in designing an excellent modern facility, Let me give a few more details of the air conditioning and DRUPS machine use.
Fujitsu’s New Data Centre Uses Low Ambient Air Temperature To Minimise the Use Of Chillers
When the ambient temperature in the area is below 11oC, which is a large percentage of the year as per a Northern Hemisphere climate. Air flows through the evaporative tower allowing the water to be chilled before going through heat exchangers. The heat exchangers are the clever part, transferring energy and allowing the cooling of the water returning from the technical hall before it enters the chillers. The two water loops never meet or mix. This supplementing and complimenting of the mechanical load helps drive energy efficiency. The chilled water then is pumped onto the CRAC and forced out to the cold aisles within the technical halls. Fujitsu maintains a temperature in these rooms of around 24oC. I’ve shown a design of the system in Figure 2.
Standard machines such as Fujitsu’s Primergy RX300 typically have extra internal cooling fans, Fujitsu maintains the environment to a level that will avoid ironically increasing energy consumption through the activation of fans of the installed IT infrastructure.
DRUPS Flywheels Maintain Electricity During Power Cuts
Fluctuations in power are an expected event in data centres. Its DRUPS machines are a generator system mated to two flywheels in turn connected to a marine diesel engine, which will are able to maintain electrical supply during the short period whilst the engine is fired up. These DRUPS supply electricity until the mains connection comes back on line. In reality the power fluctuations cuts are typically short, but guaranteeing a stable supply is obviously essential in a highly-available data centre. In the case of a long power outage the DRUPS machines can run for 72 hours without refuelling. Refuelling is can occur in flight.
Fujitsu is currently one of a number of companies using DRUPS machines in data centres. They appear to have clear cost and efficiency advantages over traditional battery-powered UPSs.
Fujitsu’s Massive Data Centre Resources Allow It To Offer IaaS Offerings In The UK
Hardly surprisingly, given its massive data centre resources including those I was able to look at, Fujitsu is offering ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS) offerings to its customers in the UK, which were presented to us by Glenn Fitzgerald, Chief Technologist of Fujitsu UK and Ireland. These include:
- IaaS for Production Workloads – where clients access virtual server containers based on Fujitsu Primergy RX300 physical machines running VMWare ESX virtualisation software; there’s a choice of three performance levels and payment terms cover periods of a month
- IaaS for Development Workloads – where clients access virtual server containers 50% the size, but otherwise similar, to the production machines with the addition of Labmanager software; they are also available in three performance levels, but this time can be purchased in periods of a week.
- IaaS Storage – these offerings – based on a per GB basis – include:
- Block Mode (capacity on demand tiered in fast and slower disks and priced per port)
- File Services (file storage on demand which centralises data and reduces management overhead)
- Data Protection (de-duplication, tiered to optimise data protection and business priority)
- Archive (3 tier ‘data archive on demand’ for email and file archive, tiered for high-speed, data retention and regulatory compliance, priced per user
The benefits of Fujitsu’s IaaS offerings are lower costs over customer-owned IT, especially in the use of shared over dedicated IT infrastructure components such as servers, storage and networking. The attention it applies to improving energy efficiency in its data centres will also lower electricity costs significantly in most cases. Of course customers may pay more for communications if, but its large number of data centres in the UK should make it more cost-effective in this respect over off-shore competitors.
Its experience in working with Public and Private sector customers allows it to offer security level options which cover more UK and international regulations and standard operating procedures than many suppliers have even heard of. In particular in offering full security and compliance auditing according to the ISO27001 standard is impressive and should help to bring Cloud Computing to higher-level applications. Its rich offerings should allow customers to integrate existing corporate applications into the Cloud rather than just migrate them. It’s a good example of its developing concepts of hybrid and federated Cloud Computing.
I’m most impressed with the way that it guarantees that data and processing remains in the UK and that the customer can thereby maintain legal control and ownership of corporate information – a requirement of most regulators and a barrier to the use of many of the early Cloud Computing offerings from companies such as Google and Amazon. Of course the big American suppliers will, no doubt, offer location-based services in future, but for now Fujitsu has stolen a march.
Its overall strategy is to offer four ‘modes’ of Cloud Computing services which include IaaS, Application as a Service, Activity as a Service and Content as a Service – see my earlier analysis.
Some Conclusions – Fujitsu UK’s Evolutionary Approach To Cloud Is Backed Up With Strong, Localised Data Centre Resources
When looking at its global strategy Fujitsu indicated that it gave significant autonomy to regional managers, letting them adjust their go-to-market approaches according to the culture of the country and the needs of their customers. Perhaps because of this I found that many of Fujitsu’s customers are large UK – rather than international – clients. This is by no means a disadvantage since Fujitsu has developed a strong understanding of the operational and regulatory requirements in both the Private and Public sectors.
When it comes to the Cloud Computing market it admits that it was a late entrant. While it had revenues of ¥100 million from the area in Japan last year, other countries – such as the UK and Ireland – are just beginning to offer services.
Its IaaS offerings are clearly designed to meet the needs of its current customers, allowing them to integrate existing corporate applications with the Cloud – rather than replace them with new ones. I believe it will be successful, as its offerings are clearly more evolutionary than revolutionary. It will be particularly interesting to see the extent to which regulators work with Fujitsu to allow sensitive applications to be hosted on its Cloud.
The new London North data centre is impressive and uses up-to-date equipment and processes to host resilient high-availability systems in a secure and extremely energy-efficient location. Being close to London has the advantage of being within the 60km ‘speed of light’ maximum distance for transaction processing – a necessary requirement for many companies in the Financial sector. Overall I would say that it is an excellent indication of the company’s expertise and resources, both essential assets in its pursuit of Cloud Computing customers.