“With the new Unisys Consolidated Desktop Solution, Unisys and Microsoft are providing enterprise customers with another flexible way to integrate Windows Vista into a dynamic real-time infrastructure," said Scott Woodgate, director, Windows Product Management, Microsoft Corp. "Combining Unisys services with Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop, this solution helps clients use their IT resources more efficiently, maintain centralized data access, streamline operations and improve business continuity."

Distributed, underutilized e-mail environments increasingly pose a challenge for enterprise clients seeking to reduce the IT footprint and reduce operational costs. The new Unisys Consolidated Solution for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 addresses that challenge. This solution, which can be deployed on Unisys and other enterprise servers, uses consolidation technologies to enable a higher density of mailboxes per server. This approach leads to improved system utilization with greater manageability, lower power usage and reduced operating expenses.

In a deployment for a large bank in Central Europe, this solution enabled 62 servers handling more than 30,000 mailbox accounts to be reduced to two Unisys ES7000 Enterprise Servers accommodating 42,000 mailbox users, with improved provisions for disaster recovery. This reduced the bank’s infrastructure costs, increased workers’ capability to meet customer needs, enhanced security and improved its position for future growth.

Storage Virtualization Enhances Data Access across the Enterprise
The new Unisys Storage Virtualization solutions announced today help clients to reduce the costs of maintaining multiple storage systems connected to siloed server environments – and having to pay the price of idle capacity and higher equipment footprint, power consumption and ownership costs. The Unisys solution increases the efficiency of storage resources, availability of information and utilization of existing storage facilities.

Unisys Storage Virtualization solutions enable clients to design and implement a central storage system comprising a reduced number of storage arrays, which can be accessed as virtual resources by components of an enterprise-wide real-time infrastructure. Servers can view heterogeneous storage arrays as a common pool of resources, allocating storage to any application dynamically whenever necessary. The entire storage system can be managed through a single interface to all arrays.

The Storage Virtualization solutions use Unisys assessment, implementation, management and support services, complemented by best-in-class storage virtualization technology from select Unisys partners.

New Server Boosts Options for Virtualization and Energy Efficiency
Adding a new dimension in power to its high-end Unisys ES7000 Enterprise Server family, Unisys announced the ES7000 Model 7405R. This new model expands clients’ options for hosting virtualized applications in a real-time infrastructure. Supporting up to eight Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, a single model 7405R server can host a whole suite of virtualized applications. The system features new Rapid Virtualization Indexing technology, which improves memory management for virtual machines and optimizes performance. The new model also provides efficient power supply design, which minimizes energy loss, and improved cooling capabilities, which lower power consumption and reduce operational costs.

In a comparative benchmark against a two-socket quad-core commodity server – the kind of small system on which virtualization deployments are typically done today – the Model 7405R yielded better performance on virtualized workloads. The system supported 128 virtual machines, versus 12 on the other system, at a 66 percent lower cost per virtual machine. In addition, the Model 7405R reduced the three-year total cost of ownership by 66 percent and provided a 72 percent reduction in power and cooling costs.

The ES7000 Model 7405R supports multiple operating environments, including Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and 2003 Datacenter, Enterprise and Standard Editions; Microsoft Virtual Server; Red Hat Enterprise Linux; SUSE Linux Enterprise Server; and Sun Microsystems Solaris 10.