Unisys Expands Real-Time Infrastructure Solutions
Unisys has broadened its offering of real-time infrastructure solutions, including new services to facilitate virtualization in real-time infrastructure; virtualized desktop, mailbox and storage solutions; and a new server intended to extend clients’ options for enterprise computing. “The overarching theme is less is more,” Jody Little, vice president of solutions and services, Unisys, told 5 Minute Briefing. “This is the second wave of our offerings in support of the real-time infrastructure strategy we announced back in February. This is delivering the next wave of solutions and services which really capitalize on virtualization to bring cost savings and better align the infrastructure to business goals.”
Key among the new offerings are two new services for virtualization. Unisys 3D Blueprinting for Virtualization service, Little said, is targeted at clients in the early stages of virtualization, evaluation or planning, and “helps them architect the implementation for virtualization.” The second, the Unisys Virtualization Operational Readiness Assessment service, uses ITIL best practices and helps clients “take a look at the potential operational impact before they go forward and implement virtualization,” said Little. Using a workshop approach, clients can determine how they must change business and IT processes for virtualization.
Additionally, two new Unisys solutions enable clients to virtualize applications and functional deployments in their Microsoft environment. The new Unisys Consolidated Desktop Solution consolidates, virtualizes and hosts desktop infrastructures onto centralized servers and storage systems, allowing organizations to replace desktop PCs with thin-client alternatives. The solution offers host pooling for more efficient use of server resources, better performance and lower power consumption. A second solution for the Microsoft environment, the new Unisys Consolidated Solution for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, is intended to address the challenge of distributed, underutilized email environments. This solution, which can be deployed on Unisys and other enterprise servers, uses consolidation technologies to enable a higher density of mailboxes per server.
Unisys also announced solutions to help clients to reduce storage costs through virtualization. “The role of storage virtualization is basically to knock down the barriers between the individual storage silos in the data center - and put in a virtualization layer that allows you to see all of that storage as one shared pool, with tiering between the various classes of capability,” stated Colin Lacey, vice president of systems and storage, Unisys. This allows organizations to drive a significant level of storage savings,” largely by putting the data in the most effective tier of storage, he noted. The Storage Virtualization solutions use Unisys assessment, implementation, management and support services, as well as storage virtualization technology from Unisys partners.
Finally,Unisys also announced a new member of the Unisys ES7000 Enterprise Server family, the new ES7000 Model 7405R. Supporting up to eight Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, a single model 7405R server can host a 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 and improved cooling capabilities. For more details, go here, go here.
Back
to top
UNITE and Unisys Team Up to Present Highlights of 2007 UNITE Conference; 2008 Conference Registration Now Open
Leading up to the next UNITE Annual Technology Conference, “Adapting to a Changing World,” UNITE and the Unisys eCommunity are teaming up to make available some of the award-winning presentations from the 2007 UNITE Conference. By viewing these UNITE eCommunity Webinar presentations it is hoped that the Web event attendees will experience a sample of the kind of in-depth sessions that are available at every UNITE conference. Registration is going on now for this year's UNITE conference, to be held October 19-22, 2008, at the Caribe Royale Orlando in Orlando, FL.
Four UNITE Webinars will be presented this summer. These include “Application Modernization - Strategies for Achieving Flexibility and Agility” presented by Cem Tanyel, vice president, Application Services, Unisys, on June 17; “Converting Your GUI Forms to ASP.NET” presented by George E. McGowan, Jr., president, McGowan Computer Associates on June 24; “Experiences with Integrating Off-the-Shelf Search Engines to Complement Your ClearPath System” presented by Thomas Schaefer, systems architect, UPP Business Systems, on July 17; and “Lead Link - Creating XHTML 1.0 Transitional, Compliant and Accessible Code” presented by Martin Reed, application systems analyst, EMC Insurance Companies, on August 19.
For more information about the Webinars, and to register, go here.For more on the upcoming UNITE conference, visit the UNITE Web site.
Back
to top
Tripwire Offers Free Configuration Check Utility for VMware ESX Hypervisor
Tripwire, a leader in configuration assessment and change auditing for virtual environments, has introduced Tripwire ConfigCheck, a free utility to quickly assess configuration settings for the VMware ESX hypervisor.
The technology was co-developed by Tripwire and VMware, Mark Gaydos, vice president of marketing, Tripwire, told 5 Minute Briefing. “The one thing that VMware will tell you again and again is that they have a very solid environment but ultimately any risks that do exist” have to do with “somebody misconfiguring a VMware environment.” As a result, he said, VMware has created hardening guidelines, which are essentially their best practices to show people how to properly configure a VMware environment so that it is as secure as possible. There are between 50 and 100 different configuration settings, said Gaydos. “The challenge is really going through a system and manually having to check all of those.”
Tripwire ConfigCheck provides an immediate assessment of the configurations of a VMware ESX hypervisor, comparing them against VMware hardening security guidelines, and then providing remediation instructions if any are needed. If the tool shows users their configuations are out of alignment with the hardening policy, said Gaydos, users can “go to a place on our Web site that will show them how to remediate it.”
"Two of the most important security issues customers should focus on are misconfiguration and patching," according to Raghu Raghuram, vice president, products and solutions, VMware. "With VMware Update Manager which we introduced earlier this year, we have simplified the management of our customers’ Virtual Infrastructure by automating the deployment of patches and updates. Tripwire ConfigCheck now adds to that capability by providing customers with a tool to proactively compare their VMware configurations with proven, hardening guidelines developed using best practices from the most business-critical VMware Infrastructure deployments."
Tripwire ConfigCheck is available for free and can be downloaded here. Additional information can be found here.
Back
to top
Unisys Study Pinpoints Identity Theft and Misuse of Personal Information as Continuing Concern for Consumers
The latest U.S. results of the Unisys Security Index reveal that while overall personal security concerns decreased slightly from last year, 70 percent of respondents still demonstrated concern about someone stealing their identity and misusing personal information.
The Unisys Security Index presents a social indicator of how safe consumers feel in relation to four areas of security: national, financial, Internet and personal safety. Unisys conducted the first wave of the U.S. research in August 2007, as part of a bi-annual global research effort that studies consumer sentiment of security issues in 14 countries. The second wave of U.S. research was fielded among more than 1,000 Americans in March 2008.
According to the study, a majority of Americans are extremely or very concerned (64 percent) about someone illegally obtaining and using their credit or debit cards. And, seven in 10 Americans were equally concerned about access to or misuse of personal information, which is consistent with the baseline study conducted by Unisys in August 2007. Worry about online shopping and banking was greatest among the baby boomer generation, with almost half of the respondents between the age of 45 and 64 expressing concern, the study showed.
Consequently, Unisys said, banks still need to better understand how to manage consumer concern about identify theft and credit card fraud. “Given the financial crisis that banks find themselves in as a result of the sub-prime mortgage debacle, their bottom lines would be well-served if they could boost customers’ confidence in online banking and other e-payment services,” said Tim Kelleher, vice president for Enterprise Security, Unisys.
Back
to top |
