Microsoftdownload.microsoft.com/.../Fujitsu_WindowsServer2012R…  · Web viewIn the computer field, Fujitsu makes supercomputers, mainframes, personal computers, mobile devices,

Fujitsu Reduces Cloud Storage Costs by 35 Percent, Creates More Competitive Offering

OverviewCountry or Region: JapanIndustry: Professional services—IT services

Customer ProfileFujitsu Limited is the world’s fourth-largest IT services provider and the largest in Japan. FORTUNE Magazine named Fujitsu one of the world’s most admired companies in 2013.

Business SituationFujitsu had created a successful hosted private cloud service but wanted to reduce storage costs to make its offering more competitive.

SolutionFujitsu upgraded to Windows Server 2012 R2 to take advantage of storage tiering and industry-standard storage devices.

Benefits Reduce storage costs by 35 percent Deliver high input/output performance Create flexible, cost-competitive hybrid

cloud services

“By using Windows Server 2012 R2 storage tiering and JBOD storage, we were able to cut the initial cost of FUJITSU Cloud IaaS Private Hosted A5+ storage by 35 percent.”

Kentarou Fuji, Manager, Service Business Unit,Cloud Business Development Department, Fujitsu Limited

Fujitsu Limited has been increasing its focus on hybrid cloud offerings and provides an on-premises private cloud, a hosted private cloud, and a public cloud. However, storage costs for its hosted private cloud offering were higher than the very competitive market could bear, and Fujitsu needed to find a lower-cost option. It upgraded to Windows Server 2012 R2 to take advantage of storage tiering and low-cost JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) storage. With this strategy, Fujitsu is able to offer a cost-competitive hosted private cloud offering that also provides very high performance. This lets Fujitsu host applications such as Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server at attractive prices. Further, customers have the freedom to adopt hybrid cloud computing, running applications on–premises, at Fujitsu, or in Windows Azure.

SituationFujitsu Limited, a global computer manufacturer and software developer, was originally established as Fuji Communication Apparatus Manufacturing in 1935. Its main business segments include technology solutions (system platforms and services), client computing solutions (PCs, tablets, and smartphones), and delivery solutions (electronic parts). In the computer field, Fujitsu makes supercomputers, mainframes, personal computers, mobile devices, and storage and network devices.

After forming a local alliance with Microsoft Japan in 2000, Fujitsu expanded its partnership with Microsoft

in 2002 and formed a global alliance. In 2010, it formed a strategic cloud computing alliance with Microsoft, and in 2013, the two companies formed a hybrid cloud computing alliance. Fujitsu has been focused on cloud computing since the earliest stages of the technology. Now, to support the growth of customers, Fujitsu is putting more stress on efforts for hybrid cloud computing based on the FUJITSU Cloud Initiative, which uses Microsoft cloud software as the key component.

“Modernization, which streamlines and optimizes a huge amount of customer IT resources, and innovation, which flexibly and quickly responds to changes in society, are our missions,” says Kentarou Fuji, Manager, Service Business Unit, Cloud Business Development Department, Fujitsu Limited. “Our solutions, such as those for enterprise communications and customer relationship management services, have important roles in this mission.“

To run application services such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Exchange Server, and Microsoft Lync Server, Fujitsu offered a variety of cloud solutions: an on-premises private cloud (FUJITSU Integrated System Cloud Ready Blocks), a hosted private cloud (FUJITSU Cloud IaaS Private Hosted A5+ for Windows Server), and a public cloud (FUJITSU Cloud PaaS A5 for Windows Azure). All worked with Windows Azure. Fujitsu’s goal was to coordinate its cloud services and provide customers with “one-stop” shopping.

FUJITSU Cloud IaaS Private Hosted A5+, which is a hosted private cloud for service providers, was launched in November 2013. It allows customers to use Hyper-V server pools and storage pools located in Fujitsu data centers and to dynamically adjust those resources as their needs fluctuate.

The offering has many advantages such as support of most security policies and flexible system customization. However, because Fujitsu used its storage area network (SAN) disk array product, ETERNUS DX80, for FUJITSU Cloud IaaS Private Hosted A5+ storage, storage costs were high—higher than the price-competitive application hosting market could bear.

“SAN technology can provide quite high I/O [input/output] performance but leads to an increase in the unit price of storage,” says Kazuhiko Ito, Managing IT Architect, Service Solution Department, Platform Service Division, Fujitsu Limited. “SAN storage may be within an allowable price range for mission-critical systems, but for the price-competitive communications services hosting market, hosting services such as Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, and Lync Server, the price needed to be competitive. If the price of our services is higher than the market price, they cannot attract customers. To provide these services at prices fitting customers’ budgets and to ensure a level of profit, we had to reduce our storage costs.”

SolutionAlthough Fujitsu wanted to reduce storage costs, it did not want to degrade storage performance by doing so. Whatever new storage it selected had to deliver the same level of I/O performance as the SAN storage had provided. Also, the number of operation management efforts (e.g., disk exchanges and rebuilding at failure) should not increase.

Fujitsu considered replacing the SAN storage with Network Attached Storage. However, it decided to use JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) storage, which contains a mixture of solid state disks (SSD) and hard disk drives (HDD). JBOD devices are disk arrays without redundant array of independent disks (RAID) interfaces. At the same time, the company decided to upgraded its Scale-Out File Servers on Windows Server 2012 to the Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system to take advantage of storage tiering capabilities and the Storage Spaces feature.

Storage Spaces, introduced in Windows Server 2012, provides virtualization enhancements to storage that organizations can use to pool multiple physical hard disk drives together and provide feature-rich, highly resilient storage arrays. Storage tiering builds on Storage Spaces by allowing low-cost, high-capacity disk drives to be used to store less frequently used data, while high-speed solid state drives store frequently used data.

In July, 2013, Fujitsu began working to add JBOD as a storage option for FUJITSU Cloud IaaS Private Hosted A5+. When the internal design was complete, Fujitsu started the storage device selection process, which would determine the success or failure of the project.

In the end, it decided to use its own Fujitsu JX40 JBOD product, which could be acquired at a relatively reasonable price. Since the JX40 product had both SSD and HDD, Fujitsu reasoned that it would be possible to achieve the high I/O performance using SSDs. Also, JX40 was an early supporter of Windows Server 2012 R2 storage tiering.

“To provide these [hosted communications] services at prices fitting customers’ budgets and to ensure a level of profit, we had to reduce our storage costs.”

Kazuhiko Ito, Managing IT Architect, Service Solution Department, Platform

Service Division, Fujitsu Limited

In October, all of the necessary equipment was in place, and Fujitsu started validation testing. Fujitsu evaluated the I/O performance and the operability for both a Scale-Out File Server connected to ETERNUS DX80 and a Scale-Out File Server connected to the JX40 under the same conditions. It discovered that the JX40 produced comparable performance to the ETERNUS DX80.

For FUJITSU Cloud IaaS Private Hosted A5+, Fujitsu moved data from Scale-Out File Servers connected to ETERNUS

DX80 to JX40 using the storage migration capabilities of Windows Server 2012 R2. After the final examination and trial operation, Fujitsu launched a trial version of the service in November 2013.

Fujitsu uses a 10-gigabit per second Ethernet connection between the Hyper-V host clusters and Scale-Out File Servers. There are two types of Hyper-V host clusters: a host group for customer services and a host group for Fujitsu data centers. The former runs customer applications, including Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, and Lync Server. The latter runs Microsoft System Center 2012 R2.

The system consists of five customer service host groups (Hyper-V host clusters), three System Center 2012 R2 host groups (Hyper-V host clusters), and two Active Directory groups running on the host operating system. For customer service host groups, a cluster can contain a maximum of 64 devices. However, for further protection, every 32 devices are assembled into one host group so that scale-out is available to customers that need it.

For storage, the initial two Scale-Out File Servers share either Fibre Channel over Ethernet-connected SAN storages (ETERNUS DX 80s) or serial-attached SCSI-connected JBOD devices (JX40s). Without unifying storage into either of these two types, Fujitsu intends to provide services at different storage prices.

“To increase the I/O performance, we use storage tiering and write-back cache, which has 1 gigabyte by default and can be expanded to 5 gigabytes on SSDs,” says Ito. “Since we think availability is an important factor for our services, two-way mirroring is applied to the storage layout.”

BenefitsBy deploying Windows Server 2012 R2, Fujitsu Limited was able to use lower-cost, industry-standard JBOD storage with its FUJITSU Cloud IaaS Private Hosted A5+ hosted private cloud offering, reducing storage costs without sacrificing I/O performance. This helps Fujitsu market the service to smaller organizations that cannot afford expensive SAN storage. Customers also have the freedom to move workloads between their own data centers, Fujitsu data centers, and Microsoft data centers.

Reduce Storage Costs by 35 Percent

The most important benefit that Fujitsu realized by using JBOD storage is a dramatic reduction in storage costs. “By using Windows Server 2012 R2 storage tiering and JBOD storage, we were able to cut the initial cost of FUJITSU Cloud IaaS Private Hosted A5+ storage by 35 percent,” says Fuji. “This is a significant competitive advantage for us in a price-sensitive marketplace.”

Deliver High I/O Performance Fujitsu was also able to maintain high I/O performance for its hosted private cloud by combining the JX40 SSDs and Windows Server 2012 R2 storage tiering. Benchmark tests proved that it could achieve 8 times the input/output operations (IOPS) for random read (QD=32) and 3.2 times the IOPS for random read (QD=32).

Operationally, the number of steps needed to exchange failed disks increased a bit; however, Fujitsu was able to rebuild disks in parallel by using available disk space in Windows Server 2012 R2 storage pools. This enabled quick recovery.

Create Flexible, Cost-Competitive Hybrid Cloud ServicesFuji says, “As a result of our successful cost reduction, we are able to provide enhanced value and greater cost-competitiveness for price-sensitive customers. We gained an advantage so that we can provide application services such as Exchange Server at more competitive and attractive prices.”

Following the success of its JBOD addition to FUJITSU Cloud IaaS Private Hosted A5+, Fujitsu has begun to consider other ways to enhance the functionality of this offering. Its first plan is to add JBOD to customer service host group storage. For small and midsize customers, Fujitsu plans to introduce network interface cards that support Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA); this will provide faster data transmission to remote hosts. In addition, for better operations management, Fujitsu plans to use the Orchestrator component of System Center 2012 R2 to automate operation processes.

Another big advantage: application fluidity across cloud environments. Customers can transparently run their applications in their own cloud environment, in a service provider’s cloud, or in Windows Azure. “This infrastructure flexibility, and the ability to manage virtual machines in all three environments using a single control panel, namely System Center, lets us and our customers take full advantage of hybrid cloud computing,” Fuji says.

“This infrastructure flexibility, and the ability to manage virtual machines in all three environments using a single control panel, namely System Center, lets us and our customers take full advantage of hybrid cloud computing.”Kentarou Fuji, Manager, Service Business

Unit, Cloud Business Development Department, Fujitsu Limited

“As a result of our successful cost reduction, we are able to provide enhanced value and greater cost-competitiveness for price-sensitive customers.”

Kentarou Fuji, Manager, Service Business Unit, Cloud Business

Development Department, Fujitsu Limited

Transform the data centerThe hybrid cloud from Microsoft transforms the data center by extending existing investments in skills and technology with public cloud services and a common set of management tools. With an on-premises infrastructure connected to the Windows Azure platform, you can deliver services faster and scale up or down quickly to meet changing needs.

For more information about transforming the data center, go to:www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/modern-data-centerFor More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com

For more information about Fujitsu Limited products and services, visit the website at: www.fujitsu.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published January 2014

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Windows Server 2012 R2− Microsoft System Center 2012 R2