Fujitsu IaaS platform technology for on-demand physical servers

Fujitsu Laboratories yesterday said it has developed a platform technology for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for on-demand physical servers that are configured to a user's needs and can be provided in 10 minutes.

Fujitsu said this technology is the first of its kind in the world.

Currently, physical IaaS, or physical server-hosting services, which provides physical servers installed in a datacentre, requires that the service operator manually install and configure servers at the customer's request, leading to a lag time of several days between the time when a customer orders new servers and when the servers actually go online.

The new technology makes use of another Fujitsu Laboratories innovation, 'resource pool architecture', which makes it possible to configure physical servers on-demand and instantly respond to customer orders.

Rsource pool architecture pools the various individual hardware resources of a datacentre - including CPUs, memory, and disk storage - and brings them together as part of an architecture created within a physical server.

This technology gives customers the ability to quickly bring high-performance physical servers online and instantly change hardware configurations, enabling greater flexibility in changing server numbers or the performance of individual servers to respond to changes in application loads.

This also means that physical IaaS will have the benefit of the same sort of easy on-demand configurability that virtual IaaS have already offered. Through automation, the service provider can improve hardware resource utilization which will lead to reduced operating costs.

Fujitsu Laboratories is beginning internal trials of this technology in July 2013, and will conduct additional R&D with an eye toward further enhancing cloud services.