Japanese IT giant Fujitsu has brought its K5 hybrid cloud to Europe, with the OpenStack-based service now available from Tier III certified data centers in the UK.

K5 can be deployed as a public cloud, private virtual cloud, private cloud hosted in a Fujitsu data center or private cloud hosted on-premises. It will eventually support VMware environments and offer bare-metal servers.

The launch in the UK will be followed by roll-outs in Finland, Germany and Spain, as well as Singapore, North America and Australia later in 2017.

Throwing down the gauntlet

Fujitsu K5
– Fujitsu

K5 was launched in Japan at the end of 2015, positioned as Fujitsu’s big public cloud play. The company itself was one of the first users, having migrated 640 business systems and 13,000-plus servers to K5.

Fujitsu might be late to the party, but what it loses in customer traction, it makes up in functionality. K5 is the centerpiece of Fujitsu’s MetaArc platform and supports four different cloud deployment models, while ensuring 100 percent infrastructure and application compatibility.

This sets it apart from service providers like AWS and Google Cloud that only offer public cloud, or HPE which only offers private with Helion.

This is not your run-of-the-mill OpenStack either – Fujitsu has made further improvements to the software platform that was recently praised for its stability and readiness for production workloads.

“OpenStack has been very attractive from the openness of the platform and from the cost perspective, but a lot of the enterprises haven’t been so keen to try it because they don’t believe it has the enterprise scalability feature sets,” Mark Phillips, Head of Cloud Platforms, Services and Hybrid IT at Fujitsu EMEIA, told DatacenterDynamics.

“So Fujitsu has focused nearly all of its development efforts on scaling OpenStack, adding to the resiliency, failover and security aspects of the base OpenStack releases, to make OpenStack available and acceptable to the enterprise.”

The infrastructure for K5’s first European region will be hosted in two data centers in London, offering 99.99 percent availability Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and providing data residency in the EU – at least for now.

Fujitsu will dedicate a total of eight European data centers to K5 once the service is fully deployed across EMEA, two for every zone.

K5 includes access to Cloud Foundry, the open source app development Platform-as-a-Service which counts the UK Government Digital Service among its customers. Other PaaS offerings in the Fujitsu cloud include Apigee which does API security and management, and UShareSoft, a workload automation platform that was recently acquired by the Japanese company.