Fujitsu launches new storage to 'solve over/under provisioning'

Fujitsu has introduced two new products into its Eturnus DX range that it claims could solve the problem of over or under provisioning enterprise storage.

The new systems, the Eturnus DX8700 S3 and DX8900 S3 are, at the top end, capable of up to four million IOPS and can scale up to 14-petabytes in capacity.

Frank Reichart, senior director of product marketing for storage at Fujitsu, told IT Pro: "These products are aimed at data centre users that are either in the upper terabyte level of data today in the data centre, or the very big data centres that are running petabyte levels of storage today."

He said these types of customers are seriously affected by uncertainty around data growth.

"In previous years, these users knew to add just 30 per cent or 50 per cent on what they had and that would be sufficient for the next five or seven years, but today there are so many new applications creating so much more data," Reichart said.

"IT is constantly doing consolidation projects as well. So, if you have to buy storage today, you either go on the safe side and buy systems that are too big, which kills the IT department's budget, or you go more conservative and buy a smaller amount, but then you hit a ceiling within the lifetime of the system and you have to buy something extra," he added.

Additionally, a significant proportion of enterprise IT departments' time is spent tuning and tweaking existing infrastructure to try and get the best performance out of it, which is a waste of resources.

According to Fujitsu, the Eturnus DX8700 S3 and DX8900 S3 offer a fundamentally different proposition from traditional enterprise storage.

"We decided to build a system that has a lot of headroom, but you don't have to invest up-front, it should be automated to make it easy to operate for the same team, and it should not fail," said Reichart.

Consequently, the new systems are flexible, the company believes, allowing datacentre operators to add additional storage as needed, and automate flexibly as well depending on which apps they want to prioritise.

Fujitsu said it is also able to offer 100 per cent up-time through the new devices, even in the event of multiple component failure, although, as Reichart explained, it does involve additional hardware.

"In the past, achieving zero downtime in storage was extremely expensive and complicated," Reichart said. "So we simplified it using a storage cluster, meaning there are two systems, and it is always ensured that the data is on both of them so that if one fails the other takes over."

Reichart said users don't have to put virtualisation on top to enable this, and that the failover part of the cluster can be any size from Fujitsu's DX range.

The DX8700 S3 and DX8900 S3 are available as spinning disk, flash or a mixture of both. They can be ordered immediately and will begin shipping on 1 August.