Unisys Corporation (NYSE: UIS) today announced Version 2 of its Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution, the company’s flagship cloud solution for clients’ and cloud service providers’ data centers.

The enhanced solution incorporates enhancements to the core software stack, as well as expanded management, security and infrastructure automation capabilities. These enhancements improve performance, simplify management of an integrated IT environment and make it easier for clients to preserve existing technology investments.

As part of Unisys’ Hybrid Enterprise strategy, the Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution gives clients an integrated, cost-efficient vehicle to provide on-demand IT resources and manage hybrid IT environments comprising both traditional and cloud-based IT delivery models.

Based on client feedback as well as Unisys’ own experience in running its entire engineering development operation thorough this solution, Unisys estimates that the  Secure Private Cloud Solution can yield a typical organization operational and cost avoidance savings of up to $6 million over five years.¹

“Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution enables clients to transform data center operations into a flexible self-service environment to manage an entire IT infrastructure comprising both cloud and non-cloud resources,” said Rod Sapp, vice president, Data Center Transformation and Outsourcing Products and Technology, Unisys. “We developed this solution with the enterprise requirements of clients such as our ClearPath users in mind. We’ve built in the mission-critical attributes they expect – security, reliability, scalability, flexibility, advanced automation and support for mobility – and wrapped them into a powerful, easy-to-manage, cost-efficient platform.”

As an enterprise-class solution, the Secure Private Cloud Solution enables clients to avoid two potentially costly complications of enterprise cloud initiatives. The first, virtual machine sprawl, often results from over-reliance on commodity virtualization systems. The second, “cloud in a corner” syndrome, is a condition where new cloud-based solutions are disconnected from existing IT resources, leading to higher costs due to greater infrastructure complexity, overlapping staff skills and inadequate return on resource investment.

New Features Build on Mission-Critical Capabilities for Performance, Management

Key enhancements in Secure Private Cloud Version 2 include:

• An enhanced open software framework that gives clients greater flexibility in changing elements of the stack and integrating the solution with widely used IT service management systems such as BMC Remedy and IBM Tivoli. This helps clients avoid “lock-in” to a specific software supplier’s tools and enables them to protect and extend use of existing software investments.
• Single-pane management of all resources within the cloud environment. This software-based capability, which uses an advanced graphical user interface (GUI), is separated from the physical platform and linked to the administrative console only by an IP connection. That way it can be used to manage multiple computing environments in a hybrid enterprise comprising traditional data centers, outsourced resources and multiple types of clouds. IT administrators can connect to the management interface through a browser on an iPad or any other mobile device. A new operations portal provides a graphical dashboard so administrators can easily see how each system in the IT environment is performing against defined key performance indicators (KPI).

• Role-based single sign-on security for simplified access to cloud operations. This new feature complements the security capabilities of Unisys Stealth solution, which clients can use in conjunction with the Secure Private Cloud Solution to provide an extra measure of security for business information.
• Tight integration with the Unisys Converged Remote Infrastructure Management Suite solution, which monitors and correlates events across all segments of a managed infrastructure to orchestrate preventive and pre-emptive action against potential IT faults. This makes Secure Cloud Solution ideal for cloud service providers who require integrated monitoring and management of their IT environment.
• Enhanced automated orchestration capabilities that enable faster policy-based allocation of resources to meet fluctuating business demands.

Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution also uses a usage metering capability that collects information on utilization of IT resources, such as processors, memory, I/O and storage. The system then allocates the charges back to the business organizations that use them. Each business group pays only for the resources it uses.

Unisys also offers a comprehensive set of advisory, planning and implementation services for clients seeking a hybrid enterprise or cloud solution. Unisys Advisory Services for Data Center and Cloud Transformation help clients determine whether cloud computing is right for their organization – and if so, which style is best. When they have decided on a cloud direction , Unisys CloudBuild Services can help them plan, design and implement the right solution cost-efficiently.