As part of its efforts to expand the range of secure cloud computing options available to enterprise CIOs, Unisys recently introduced the Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution. Unisys also announced enhancements, including a disaster recovery service, to Unisys Secure Cloud Solution, the company's managed public cloud offering.
Back in June, Unisys announced a four-part strategy, and has already delivered on the first two pieces, Cloud Transformation Services and the Unisys Secure Cloud. This latest introduction, part three of the strategy, is the company's "cloud in a box" offering, which has been renamed to Secure Private Cloud. "That basically takes everything we have learned in terms of building our own Unisys Cloud and makes it available in a pre-packaged solution with or without hardware depending on what the client would like so they can roll it right into their data center and get all the advantages of cloud computing inside their data center," Rich Marcello, president, Unisys Technology, Consulting and Integration Solutions, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution, scheduled for availability in December 2009, is intended to help clients reduce IT costs through server and storage virtualization; remove IT bottlenecks through automated operations and immediate, as-needed self-service provisioning of resources; and align the supply of IT resources to fluctuating business demand. For ease of deployment, the pre-loaded solution allows a full range of virtualization, including scale-up and scale-out, and supports physical as well as virtual machines. The solution enables automated virtual provisioning and repurposing of IT resources on the fly and provides automated resource tracking to facilitate allocation of IT usage costs to specific groups.
"If you think about private cloud computing, it is basically everything you would expect in an external cloud. You can have multi-tenants except in this particular case the tenants are now departments instead of actual separate customers," Marcello explains. "Our claim to fame has been security, so in addition to all the things you would get in a standard secure private cloud or a standard cloud in a box offering, we have got security as a key differentiator where we can get take that secure private cloud and actually put a back door on it so that people can move workloads into our cloud if they would like to do that," Marcello notes. "We think because of where folks are right now in the adoption of cloud computing, a number of them will prefer a private cloud solution to a public cloud solution and so we wanted to make sure that we offered a full range of offerings, with a private cloud, a public cloud and a hybrid cloud in between."
To make it easier for users to deploy Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution, Unisys has augmented its portfolio of Cloud Transformation Services with current State Assessment, Design and Planning, Installation and Configuration, Implementation and Application Migration Services specifically for private cloud deployment.
Unisys has also added Secure Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to the Secure Cloud Solution. This new service provides comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery services on a subscription basis, typically lowering clients' cost of entry compared to in-house implementation. The service also makes it easier for clients to comply with laws and standards requiring storage and recovery of sensitive business data and applications.
And finally, Unisys is adding new capabilities to key "as a service" offerings delivered through the Secure Cloud Solution. At the end of November 2009, Unisys plans to support Microsoft stacks, including IIS Web Server, .NET Application Server and SQL Server, along with custom stacks such as IBM Websphere and Oracle, in Unisys Secure Platform as a Service (PaaS), making it easier for clients to move their applications to the cloud without changes. Unisys Secure Virtual Office as a Service (VOaaS), which provides access to standard office suites through hosted desktop services, will support qualified client-supplied devices, such as PCs used as thin clients.
For further information on Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution, go here.