Fujitsu and NetApp enhance strategic partnership for data management infrastructure

The expanded global partnership between Fujitsu and NetApp delivers new enhancements to Fujitsu’s storage portfolio. Strengthening its ETERNUS storage product portfolio based on NetApp technology, Fujitsu, as part of its efforts to deliver a data management infrastructure, is introducing new entry and midrange models: ETERNUS AB, ETERNUS HB, ETERNUS AX and ETERNUS HX⁽¹⁾. The new products will help customers leverage data faster with lower operational management costs.

ETERNUS AB and ETERNUS HB series are perfect for databases used in customers’ mission-critical systems and for advanced scientific computing systems used in HPC. These series realizes the High-Speed Data Processing⁽²⁾ that maximizes the performance of Solid-State Drives⁽³⁾, and High-Volume Data Communication⁽⁴⁾ with servers by supporting advanced data transaction protocol. Also, in hybrid cloud environments that combine on-premises and public clouds, customers can reduce operational and administrative costs by transferring data for backup archives to the public cloud.

ETERNUS AX and ETERNUS HX series are ideal for virtualized systems and file servers. These series offer both the high response performance required by virtualized systems through block access and simplified data management with file access, all in one storage.

These series non-disruptively scales up storage nodes up to maximum of 24 nodes and 26 petabytes as capacity and performance demands increase, and automatically routes data to data centers and public clouds based on how often it is accessed, enabling cost-balanced and efficient operations.

Future plans

In the future, Fujitsu intends to introduce solutions that leverage NetApp technologies for AI, hybrid cloud and HPC by combining the products and technologies of the two companies, planning to offer them by the end of 2020.

This includes the development of AI solutions that combine Fujitsu’s servers with NetApp’s storage to dramatically reduce the time it takes to design and build AI systems and learn vast amounts of data. For HPC, Fujitsu will combine the high-performance scalable file systems and data-processing technologies with NetApp storage solutions to enable advanced simulation and analysis under complex conditions.

Fujitsu also plans to develop a hybrid cloud solution leveraging NetApp Cloud Data Services that can manage private and public cloud environments in the data center with a single storage operating system.

Comment from Brad Anderson, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Hybrid Cloud Group, NetApp, Inc.

“Fujitsu has been a strategic partner for NetApp for more than two decades, and we are delighted to expand this relationship further. This collaboration combined with Fujitsu’s broader Digital Transformation strategy offers customers a comprehensive portfolio of products and solutions, targeted at critical business applications, as well as emerging workloads across edge, core, and multi-clouds.”

Comment from Kenichi Sakai, Corporate Executive Officer, Senior Vice President and Head of Infrastructure System Business Unit, Fujitsu Limited

“To succeed in digital transformation, it is important to create new value from all the data you have and make it the core of your business. We see this enhanced strategic partnership with NetApp as a critical step in supporting digital transformation by enabling customers to effectively manage and leverage their data.”

-CT Bureau