FSC showcases 'Triole' advantage during four-city Middle East roadshow

This was one of the central messages to come out of a series of four roadshows organised by Fujitsu Siemens Computers recently in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and Cairo.

The events highlighted a new strategy, called TRIOLE that enables business flexibility by making IT infrastructure more agile, efficient and reliable.

The roadshows, entitled "Optimise Your Data Centre", were attended by dealers, resellers and representatives of the region's large enterprises and were addressed by local and international FSC experts, Guenther Aust, Marketing Manager, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Germany, Christoph Lindemann, Marketing Manager, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Finland, Colin Britto, Sales Manager, Large Enterprise, Fujitsu Siemens Computers and Gavin Keeler, Regional Director, MENA, of FSC storage partners, Network Appliances.

Aust told delegates, "The main challenges facing IT managers and enterprises today are really those of increasing the efficiency of the IT infrastructure while adapting it to fast-changing business needs. Basically, this means doing more with less, but you need to build agility while ensuring business continuity through a reliable infrastructure."

"Fujitsu Siemens' TRIOLE features a three-fold combination of innovative technology based on the core principles of virtualisation, automation and integration of servers, storage solutions and software for more adaptable, economic and more reliable IT infrastructures. It helps enterprises achieve substantial reduction in the total cost of ownership and assists them in the use of available IT resources while providing reliable support for all business processes," added Aust.

Speaking about the future of Unix and Linux in the Data Centre, Christoph Lindeman said there are compelling options for moving from proprietary UNIX-on-RISC hardware to Linux-on-Intel platforms.

"The main benefits of making this move are the reduction in the total cost of ownership (TCO) through the elimination of forced upgrades. Independent software vendors (ISVs) can better compete against MS products, because they are no longer tied to proprietary systems," he said.

He added that the cost-reduction factor makes PRIMERGY Intel-based servers and Linux the most attractive combination and that while the ISVs focus is still on the Intel platform, the technical support for the Intel platform is the strongest because it is also the most widespread platform within the Linux development community.

Gavin Keeler, Regional Director of Network Appliance Inc., MENA, discussed the critical issues of storage management and disaster recovery as well as the need for minimising costly down time in large enterprises.

"The main challenges of disaster recovery facing enterprises today are basically cost-driven, so there needs to be a low-cost, reliable disaster recovery infrastructure in place," said Keeler.

"Customers need enhanced backup and disaster recovery systems, they need to be able to manage the growing volumes of information and they need to consolidate distributed data," he said.

"As IT increasingly becomes the 'central nervous system' of enterprises, it is vital that it works all the time, which places a tremendous responsibility on the vendor. It is critical that they focus on customers' real needs rather than the latest hype, that they provide robust solutions rather than slideware," said Colin Britto,

In order to make TRIOLE deliver results, FSC is cooperating closely with leading hardware vendors, software providers and system integrators to help IT departments make an important contribution to business agility, efficiency and continuity. TRIOLE also stands for a global strategy that is supported by all Fujitsu IT companies.