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Fujitsu Extends Partnership With NetApp

And on the way to stop working with EMC

Fujitsu and NetApp announced they are extending their long-standing global partnership to help customers maximise the value they get from their IT investments. IT leaders are under increasing pressure to respond faster to the needs of the business. With this agreement, the two companies deliver one-stop shopping for integrated storage solutions that accelerate business results for their customers. The expanded global partnership and extended resale agreements continue a long track record of delivering customer success, allowing business customers to increase their IT efficiency and standardisation and satisfy all of their unified storage foundation needs with Fujitsu and NetApp.

As part of the extended partnership, the companies will offer a shared portfolio of products to meet the integrated storage needs of business customers. NetApp will resell the Fujitsu ETERNUS CS800 S2 Data Protection Appliance in 22 countries across EMEA. Fujitsu will expand its resale of NetApp’s unified storage systems to more markets worldwide. Maintenance and support services as well as managed services across the full shared portfolio will continue to be supplied by Fujitsu, the third-largest global IT services company.

Designed to broaden access to efficient data protection in the midmarket, the ETERNUS CS800 S2 is a turnkey data protection appliance that provides a simple and affordable solution for customers who follow a disk backup strategy with deduplication. The advanced deduplication technology reduces typical capacity requirements for disk-to-disk back-up by as much as 90%, helping customers reduce storage costs. Back-up data replication between global sites also uses deduplication to reduce typical network bandwidth needs by a factor of 20 or more.

"Fujitsu’s global partnership with NetApp creates a well-matched and comprehensive storage portfolio that benefits our customers first and foremost," said Kazuhiro Igarashi, president of the Storage Systems Unit, Fujitsu Limited. "We’ve simplified how customers can buy integrated solutions as part of our comprehensive Dynamic Infrastructures portfolio, and helped them increase IT efficiency and flexibility. Fujitsu customers see the value we provide with NetApp, not the least due to Fujitsu’s global service expertise across the combined product range."

Fujitsu is an industry leader in enterprise solutions, and its broad portfolio of storage technologies, including the ETERNUS family and NetApp, are critical components of the Fujitsu Dynamic Infrastructures concept of highly reliable datacentre products and solutions. NetApp provides an unified storage portfolio to build a flexible and efficient shared IT infrastructure today as a foundation for tomorrow’s business requirements. Customers can now easily purchase and deploy these complementary, integrated technologies to quickly address their business needs.

"Customers are looking for ways to move to more integrated, shared IT infrastructure solutions to increase the flexibility and speed of the response of IT to the business," said Rick Scurfield, vice president and general manager of Global System Partners, NetApp. "The partnership between NetApp and Fujitsu provides powerful storage products and solutions designed to address this need, along with services and support to help customers accelerate the move to a more integrated and flexible shared IT infrastructure."

As a result of joint research and development efforts during their 10-year global partnership, the companies have delivered tightly integrated and automated data management products, solutions, and services that help customers more quickly adapt to changes in their business environments. To date, Fujitsu has sold over 15,000 NetApp unified storage systems to customers who recognize the flexibility and efficiency that these offerings deliver for their IT environments. For example, NetApp, Fujitsu, and other solutions partners recently teamed up to build a global 50,000-seat desktop virtualisation reference architecture, making it easier for customers to replicate and deploy virtualised dynamic infrastructures. Additionally, Fujitsu’s ETERNUS SF Storage Cruiser and ServerView Resource Orchestrator now support NetApp unified storage, making it simpler for joint customers to better analyse, control, and automate their shared IT infrastructure.

Comments

At CeBIT 2007 in Hannover, Germany, was organized a bigger press conference where Fujitsu Siemens Computers - now Fujitsu Technology Solutions (TS) - and EMC were celebrating their 10-year strategic alliance. "FSC is our largest partner in Europe, and our second largest worldwide, after Dell," said EMC CEO Joe Tucci at this time. The marriage is about to be consumated between the two parties.

At SNW Europe in Frankfurt, Germany, was organized a smaller press conference where Fujitsu Technology Solutions and NetApp not only celebrated their OEM agreement since 1998 but announced an extended global partnership to 2013. Up to now, Fujitsu was reselling NetApp portfolio hitting milestone of 15,000 NetApp's FAS unit sold. Here, on the opposite, NetApp will add to its catalog a new Fujitsu's product: the Eternus CS800 Data Protection Appliance based on Fujitsu' hardware and Quantum's software used in DXi-Series de-dupe VTL. Consequently, NetApp will have a replacement of defunct NearStore and the possibility to have finally Quantum's secondary de-dupe through Fujitsu after missing to acquire Data Domain. It's the first totally outsourced hardware product directly sold by the company, confirmed a NetApp's rep.

The new accord is signed for EMEA only but we have understood that it's a test that could be extended worldwide.

More than that, if you analyze the two companies and each one's culture, it could go much further. Japanese Fujitsu is an hardware company in storage, designing and manufacturing a lot of components and subsystems, and is strong in Japan but weak in USA. On the other side NetApp is mainly now a software company OEMing most of its hardware, and being strong in USA and weak in Japan. NetApp could also have access in the future to Fujitsu's servers to be in a better position against HP, Dell or IBM.

Answering to the question:" Is there a possibility to see Fujitsu adopting NetApp OnTap OS?", Dr. Helmut Beck, FTS  VP business development datacenter systems, answered:" Stay tune." NetApp EMEA senior VP and GM Andreas Koenig didn't say the contrary.

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