All clouds in one window

We all know how difficult it is to choose one IT solution from the many existing on the market. This applies to everything - servers, printers, smartphones, tablets, as well as software products and services. Each option has its advantages and disadvantages. In one case, the cost will be a clear advantage, but other parameters will remain at the minimum level. In another case, the set of functions and performance will be on top, but too high a price will override all the advantages. It happens that all the characteristics will be at the “mediocre” level, but why do we need such a level if the business must always strive forward, ahead of the competitors by a step? In short, there is no ideal either in nature or on the market. The same situation is observed with cloud services. IT services spend a lot of time searching for the most optimal way to provide cloud resources, combining affordable cost, a wide range of features, a reliable service level agreement (SLA), flexibility, simplicity and safety of use.

It is worth noting that the interest of enterprises in cloud resources has long been transferred from the theoretical to the practical plane, but at the same time, customers are interested, above all, in integrated solutions that combine the capabilities of clouds - private, hybrid, as well as "home" resources of the company. All this complex economy needs a single “control panel”, which will enable you to work with all the resources, both cloud and non-cloud, with minimal costs and maximum convenience, flexibility and transparency. One of these solutions is the Fujitsu Cloud Integration Platform (FCIP) , which we would like to talk about today.

In fact, this platform allows businesses, by analogy with BYOD, to “bring their own cloud” to the company, and the IT service will not experience any difficulties or inconveniences, since managing this cloud will be just as usual, transparent and safe. , as well as other IT resources of the company. At the same time, FCIP is not a complete boxed solution of the “set and forget” type, namely, a platform that includes a set of connectors to all cloud solutions common on the market. Clouds - a thing dynamic, constantly evolving and improving. Accordingly, the platform needs constant development and support.
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What is the principle of the FCIP? Previously, organizations created their own private clouds from virtualized resources. This private cloud infrastructure needs flexible and transparent management. At the same time, this integration platform allows the customer to manage not only their own clouds, but also to connect external clouds to them from third-party vendors, such as, for example, Windows Azure, Amazon Web Services and others. Often there is also a situation where a virtualization platform from a specific manufacturer is implemented and successfully working in your company, and you decide to purchase a solution on another platform with another hypervisor. In this case, you need to allocate resources for additional technical support and the purchase of new licenses. But over several platforms, you can install a single “umbrella” that will bring them to a single interface, which ultimately will facilitate, simplify and cheapen all management processes. Such scenarios have long been implemented at the user level in the field of email. Any self-respecting modern postal service allows you to connect to your interface accounts from other postal services. Thus, you can fully use multiple mail services (send and receive mail from them), without leaving one.



What are the main components of FCIP? In addition to connectors to all known cloud platforms and virtualization platforms, it includes a large number of different services - from those that are responsible for accepting applications to those that monitor cloud infrastructure and applications.

When introducing FCIP in an organization, consulting plays an important role, which is an essential element of such projects, since the platform itself is a fairly flexible and adaptive solution that needs to be built into the customer’s IT infrastructure, integrating with all its cloud and virtual systems, further develop as needed. This can be dealt with as a customer himself, but most often companies that do not have IT as their main activity do not have a large number of IT specialists on their staff, so Fujitsu itself can take on this support as an optimal option. In other words, when replenishing the customer's IT infrastructure with a new cloud resource or a new virtualization platform, it is necessary to work on connecting them to FCIP.

It is important to note that FCIP allows not only to manage the clouds, but also to automate business processes. For example, to link business processes with possible needs in the IT infrastructure. In practice, it looks like this. The user sees the catalog of all corporate IT resources available to him and, if necessary, independently, without writing applications and going to the IT department, allocates the necessary volume to himself. At the same time, the platform performs all permissions and approvals automatically. And not only allocate, but also carry out all the necessary billing operations. There are scenarios where a business process that requires processing in various environments, both cloud and non-cloud, will be automated, provided that all of these environments are connected to FCIP. It is in the automation of business processes, and not just in managing from a single window with clouds from different manufacturers, that the developers at Fujitsu see the advantage of their solution.

There are many FCIP accommodation options. It can work in a customer's data center, in the cloud, in a European data center, in a partner data center of Fujitsu, physically located in Russia, etc.



FCIP is still a completely new product on the market, and this applies to all countries, except, perhaps, Japan, where it appeared earlier. The number of projects to implement the platform in the West can be counted on the fingers of both hands. We will talk about several of the most interesting and illustrative examples of the use of FCIP business. A large media company that operates across Europe and has a lot of online media is interested in transferring its information resources to a scalable platform with a “pay per use” model and is also interested in a flexible cloud infrastructure that quickly adapts to business needs. A US healthcare provider using a number of SaaS services from third-party providers, with the help of FIPS, solved the task of visualizing the management of individual components of its infrastructure. A large corporation with headquarters in Japan, specializing in photographic and printing equipment, as well as image processing solutions, with the help of FIPS solves the problem of introducing new cloud services for corporate customers and dealers to the market, while intending to provide users of these services with convenient tools. for management.

Thus, FCIP helps, first, to simplify the configuration of cloud environments for users who can connect new resources if necessary, but all this will work in a secure mode under the reliable control of FCIP. Secondly, IT professionals receive a powerful tool for the operational management of a hybrid IT environment, which includes unified tools for working with cloud and non-cloud resources. In this case, all data are completely safe. Finally, the company's CIO knows who in the company uses cloud resources, how much he uses them, and how much it costs.

In conclusion, I would like to mention the resources already supported by FCIP today. Now implemented work with platforms such as Amazon WS, S5, Microsoft Windows Azure, SalesForce, Office 365, Google Apps Engine, Fujitsu Resource Orchestrator and VMware. The developers plan to implement support for Fujitsu Private Cloud and Hyper-V.

For more information about the capabilities of the Fujitsu Cloud Integration Platform and its application scenarios, Russian IT specialists will be able to learn at the annual Fujitsu World Tour , which will be held in Moscow on September 15 of this year .