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


WEBWIRE

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

BLUE BELL, Pa. – Unisys Corporation (NYSE: UIS) 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 minimizing operational risk.


The new Unisys real-time infrastructure solutions announced today include business assurance services; 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 virtualized 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 Rich Marcello, president, Unisys Systems and Technology. “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.”

Business Assurance Services: Increasing Confidence in Infrastructure
The new Unisys Business Assurance Services enable clients to create a comprehensive plan to protect critical business processes from disruption. The plan defines the required service levels at which IT must support the business, maps these service levels to specific IT requirements, and establishes a comprehensive timeline for deployment of required IT. These services enable clients to quickly evaluate the cost-benefits of disaster recovery solutions, reduce the time it takes to deploy the best solution and reduce operational costs by improving resource utilization.

The Unisys Business Assurance Services, using discovery processes and tools developed with support from Unisys partner GlassHouse Technologies and offered initially in North America and the United Kingdom, comprise the following:

* Unisys Disaster Recovery Architecture Service, which provides the client with a foundation and methodology to build end-to-end application and data disaster recovery capabilities. Unisys experts and client stakeholders identify recovery targets and implementation processes and tasks. Then they collaborate on an overall deployment strategy; document policies and procedures; and identify timeframes, dependencies and roles and responsibilities.
* Unisys Backup Modernization Service, which helps clients select new technologies and services to support modernization of backup environments at both core and remote sites. Unisys experts assist the client in assessing their existing environments, evaluating vendors’ designs and producing a reference architecture for the modernization program, along with final recommendations and a deployment plan.
* Unisys Data Protection for Backup Service, which helps clients improve backup and restore operations for business information, reducing costs by improving utilization of assets. Unisys experts also make vendor-independent recommendations and create a prioritized action plan.

With Unisys real-time infrastructure services and solutions, clients can take advantage of the Unisys 3D Blueprinting approach, which enables them to leverage IT fully to meet the needs of business. The Unisys 3D Blueprinting approach is a services-driven methodology that provides clients greater visibility into critical linkages and relationships among various levels of the organization, from strategy to IT infrastructure, enabling them to see the effects of critical decisions in advance.

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-center 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 center 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 organizations 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-stabilized 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 utilization of test and development systems to accommodate peaks in production application requirements. This software can increase blade resource utilization 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 virtualization 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 virtualization technologies such as Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX, the ES7000 Model 7600R 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 $26,430 to $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 center 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 7600R 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.

Unisys will exhibit the ES7000 Model 7600R at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas, September 15-18.

New Storage Solution Combines EMC System and Unisys Services
Unisys continues building on the Unisys Storage Virtualization 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 capitalizes on key features of the new EMC CLARiiON CX4 systems, including advanced data tiering to mitigate storage growth, in-the-array virtualization 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 virtualization 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 virtualization 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

To see what Unisys partners are saying bout the new real-time infrastructure solutions, click on the following link: http://www.unisys.com/about__unisys/news_a_events/09158910.htm

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 specialize 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.

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RELEASE NO.: 0915/8909
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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