New Unisys Offerings Help CIOs

News Release

New Unisys Offerings Help CIOs Realise the Benefits of a Real-Time Infrastructure

Powerful services, solutions and software complement new ES7000 server based on latest Intel 6-core Xeon processors and offering unsurpassed scalability

Unisys today announced a range of powerful offerings that continue to fill out the company’s vision and line of real-time infrastructure solutions. These new offerings enable clients to create an information technology (IT) infrastructure that responds dynamically to changes in the business environment while dramatically reducing IT complexity and costs and minimising operational risk.

The new Unisys real-time infrastructure solutions announced today include new solutions and software in the Unisys Infrastructure Management Suite; the new high-end ES7000 Model 7600R Enterprise Server using the latest Intel Xeon 6-core processors, which Intel also announced today; and a virtualised storage solution.

“The greatest challenge we see enterprise CIOs facing today is change in their business environment – from a sudden spike in customer requests hitting their systems or a stumble by a competitor that opens a whole new market opportunity,” said Geoff Dickson, Vice President, Sales Asia Pacific, Systems & Technology (S&T).
“Whether they convert change into a challenge or an opportunity depends on how effectively they have deployed an IT infrastructure in a way that enables them to respond in real time. Unisys delivers real-time infrastructure solutions, based on best-of-breed services and technologies, which give enterprise clients added power and confidence as they drive their business forward.”

New Solutions and Software Expand Unisys Infrastructure Management Suite
Unisys has added two new solutions and key management software components to its Infrastructure Management Suite, which automates and orchestrates management of a real-time IT infrastructure. The new Unisys solutions address critical issues of data-centre resource allocation and recovery in an era when businesses are so wholly dependent on IT that a drop in performance or an outage can seriously impact the bottom line. The new solutions and software are:
• Automation and Assurance in Configuration Management solution. Based on the new Unisys uProvision™ software (detailed below), this solution enables users to define how server resources will be automatically allocated to address the requirements of specific applications; enforce compliance with key policies; and set up and manage software distribution across physical and virtual environments. By automating those activities, this solution can reduce complexity and increase resource efficiency in a real-time infrastructure, lower risk associated with change management, enhance service levels and cut operational expenses.
• Orchestrated Disaster Recovery and Business Continuance Solution. Data centre operations often involve many stakeholders who need to be notified of a failure, determine the cause, agree on a solution and obtain the necessary approvals to initiate a fix. This solution streamlines and automates the entire disaster recovery process, enabling organisations to establish and automate process workflows for notifications, verifications, solution agreement and approvals – dramatically reducing delays in starting and completing the failover process. Based on pre-defined recovery service levels, infrastructure sensors automatically detect a failure condition and initiate the required diagnostic and corrective actions.
• Unisys uProvision™ software is the newest management software component of Unisys Infrastructure Management Suite. Based on software from Unisys partner BMC Software, Inc., Unisys uProvision fully automates allocation of IT resources – both virtual and physical – across heterogeneous environments according to application requirements based on predefined compliance policies. It also reports on changes and violations in the IT infrastructure and allows the environment to be re-stabilised automatically. The uProvision software has been shown to reduce the time associated with routine configuration dramatically.
• Unisys uAdapt™ Blade Edition software, for the Unisys ES5000 series of blade servers, can automatically change the profile of a blade server to address a specific application requirement while providing the correct network and storage connections. This special edition of Unisys uAdapt software creates a flexible pool of ES5000 blade resources that can be repurposed as necessary to address peaking business demand, failover requirements or utilisation of test and development systems to accommodate peaks in production application requirements. This software can increase blade resource utilisation significantly – with commensurate reduction in associated costs – by eliminating idle standby systems.

New High-End ES7000 Enterprise Server Leverages Latest Intel Xeon Processors
Continuing to refresh and diversify its line of enterprise servers for use in real-time infrastructures, Unisys today announced the ES7000 Model 7600R Enterprise Server. Based on the new 6-core Intel® Xeon® processors 7400 series, this new top-of-the line member of the ES7000 family provides unsurpassed scalability among Intel Xeon servers in the market.

The ES7000 Model 7600R is a 16-socket server providing up to 96 processor cores. It is designed for complex database and online transaction processing environments, large-scale consolidation and virtualisation initiatives and demanding business intelligence deployments with Microsoft SQL Server 2008.

To highlight the outstanding Microsoft SQL Server 2008 consolidation capabilities of the system, Unisys has demonstrated that the Model 7600R can support consolidation of 64 SQL Server databases into a single four-socket, 6-core Xeon processor configuration – with 24 total processor cores – better than a commodity server farm of 64 dual-socket, single-core Xeon processor servers with 128 total processor cores while using less disk and providing better response times.

Supporting premier virtualisation technologies such as Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX, the ES7000 Model provides the reliability, availability and scalability (RAS) features necessary to consolidate multiple mission-critical servers onto one system. It is also capable of supporting dynamic partitioning, which enables users to add more processor, memory and I/O resources on the fly without disrupting system operations. Unisys plans to introduce secure partitioning, which provides partitioning capabilities at the processor core level, in the first half of 2009.

Prices for the ES7000 Model 7600R range from US$26,430 to US$135,000.

Skipton Building Society, one of the UK’s largest building societies and among the first Unisys clients to purchase the new ES7000 Model 7600R, intends to use the new system to boost power for its large Microsoft SQL Server database implementation.

“Responsiveness to our customers is our highest priority, and we need servers that can handle an escalating number of customers and transactions while delivering a consistent level of service,” said Dorothy Frankland, Head of Computer Services at Skipton Building Society. “We believe that the Unisys ES7000 Model 7600R reduces batch windows, providing higher availability with the additional benefit of reducing management costs. The introduction of this latest ES7000 server to our data centre provides improved flexibility and performance without increasing the server footprint and management resources to support the expansion of real-time services to our steadily growing customer base.”

The ES7000 Model 7600 R is the first enterprise server from Unisys to use a common platform architecture that is intended to serve as the basis for future Unisys enterprise servers, including the ClearPath family of mainframe-class systems. The architecture is the result of Unisys design and manufacturing collaboration with NEC.

New Storage Solution Combines EMC System and Unisys Services
Unisys continues building on the Unisys Storage Virtualisation Solutions announced in May 2008 with the addition of a solution focused on the new EMC CLARiiON CX4 Series networked storage systems. Like other Unisys storage solutions, this one enables clients to manage storage growth and control costs by deploying best-of-breed technology and using a reduced number of storage arrays, which can be accessed as virtual resources by components of an enterprise-wide real-time infrastructure.

This solution capitalises on key features of the new EMC CLARiiON CX4 systems, including advanced data tiering to mitigate storage growth, in-the-array virtualisation capabilities for maximum flexibility and lower cost per gigabyte. The Unisys solution is VMware-certified, making it easier for a client to integrate it into an enterprise virtualisation strategy. In addition, it can be used with enterprise systems based on industry-standard technologies as well as with Unisys ClearPath mainframe-class enterprise servers.

Unisys is the world’s leading provider of solutions and support services for EMC CLARiiON products. The EMC CLARiiON CX4 storage solution benefits from Unisys assessment, implementation, management and support services, enabling clients to deploy and maintain “best fit” storage virtualisation solutions with their real-time infrastructure.

For further information on Unisys real-time infrastructure solutions, click on the following link: http://www.unisys.com/products/solutions__infrastructure/index.htm

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About Unisys Asia Pacific
Unisys helps clients with solutions for more secure business operations by aligning technology with business strategy. Drawing on a history of industry innovation and expertise, Unisys provides specialised services, delivered by trusted consultants. In Asia Pacific, Unisys delivers services and solutions through subsidiaries in New Zealand, Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Korea, Malaysia, The Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand and through distributors or resellers in other countries in the region. For more information, visit www.unisys.com.

About Unisys
Unisys is a worldwide information technology services and solutions company. We provide consulting, systems integration, outsourcing and infrastructure services, combined with powerful enterprise server technology. We specialise in helping clients use information to create efficient, secure business operations that allow them to achieve their business goals. Our consultants and industry experts work with clients to understand their business challenges and create greater visibility into critical linkages throughout their operations. For more information, visit www.unisys.com.

Unisys is a registered trademark of Unisys Corporation. All other brands and products referenced herein are acknowledged to be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

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