Fujitsu expects to begin shipping the servers at the end of March, priced at US$90,000 for a rack of 38. The CX1000 will compete with products from IBM, SGI, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, who have all released servers designed specifically for cloud providers.
While it's selling them to other companies, Fujitsu said it designed the servers in part for its own needs. "Our own data centre was one of the key guiding lights," McCormack said.
Fujitsu is starting to install the servers internally now. It expects them to help it lower the price for its own infrastructure-as-a-service offerings, due to the savings it will get from using more efficient hardware, he said.
A growing number of companies are providing infrastructure-as-a-service, opening the market for Fujitsu and its rivals. Rather than expanding their own data centers, some companies pay third parties to provide hosted computing and storage services.
"Customer demand is driving all these competitors," McCormack said. Still, from his perspective, the infrastructure-as-a-service market is still relatively small. "It's trending up but from a relatively small starting place," he said. "But more and more customers are interested in using pay-as-you-go apps."
Providers like Fujitsu are trying to offer specialised services in targeted markets to differentiate themselves from the many competitors. In the U.S. Fujitsu is targeting midsized companies that bring in about $500 million to $5 billion in revenue. "They are nimble and quick enough to look at infrastructure-as-a-service as a way forward," McCormack said.
Some service providers are also targeting specific vertical markets, he said.