Almost a full year after a giddy, typically early Microsoft announcement, Redmond’s Platform as a Service technology has left Microsoft’s data centers and is running at giant IT supplier Fujitsu.
Microsoft Azure is available on Fujitsu hardware in the company’s Tokyo data center, and customers can interact with it just like Microsoft’s U.S.-based Azure services. The Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform/A5 (FGCP/A5 or Fujitsu Azure) will be live in August; users will have to sign up with Fujitsu to access the service, and pricing is expected to be the same as current Microsoft Azure pricing. Microsoft service-level agreements stop at the edge of the data center. Fujitsu’s don’t have to. Jeff Stucker, director of the Azure program for Fujitsu America said.
Users are by and large enthused, since this announcement cuts the Gordian Knot of enterprise IT security and public cloud services. Fujitsu says that, as a longstanding colocation and hosting provider, users can be assured their data is somewhere familiar, although it does not address concerns about multi-tenancy.
Fujitsu Azure users will share data space on the platform within Fujitsu’s environment, just like Microsoft Azure users do in Microsoft’s data centers.
