Unisys has announced that it is developing new offerings that will harness the power of the new Windows Server 2008.

The company said that these solutions are designed to offer enterprise clients performance for critical applications across their enterprise -- from high-end servers in the data center to desktop systems.

Unisys stated that, as a key Microsoft alliance company, it has more than 15 years experience in deploying Microsoft technology for high-volume, mission-critical applications. Unisys said it is also one of the largest enterprise users of Microsoft technologies. Unisys is expanding its already extensive portfolio of Microsoft services and solutions to enable customers to take advantage of new features introduced in Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008. These solutions, to be announced over the course of 2008, will consist of architectural and implementation services, software and appropriate hardware to help enterprise organizations rationalize their IT environments. The resulting simplified infrastructure will enable Unisys customers to more effectively migrate to a Windows Server 2008 environment, saving them time and money while mitigating the risk of business disruption.

The new Unisys professional services, solutions and capabilities that will support the Windows Server 2008 rollout include:

• Unisys Infrastructure Management Suite, a suite of software tools that efficiently repurposes and orchestrates both Windows Server 2008 and other resources, according to application demand
• Infrastructure consulting
• Security and networking
• Disaster recovery services
• Identity and access management

Unisys said it clients such as Edgenet/Big Hammer Data have already begun to realize the enterprise benefits that Microsoft platforms can yield when combined with Unisys services and solutions. Big Hammer acquires and manages product data from thousands of manufacturers for retailers such as The Home Depot and Lowe's. For Big Hammer it was imperative that its IT infrastructure support updated and accurate data to meet the needs of suppliers' and retailers' supply chains.

To ensure the level of performance and reliability necessary to map the IT infrastructure back to its business objectives, Big Hammer deployed a scalable solution consisting of a Unisys enterprise server platform combined with Microsoft SQL Server 2005. As a result, Big Hammer was able to offer solutions to suppliers and retailers that can handle continual data volume growth, while reducing lines of code for one of its solutions from hundreds of thousands to approximately 5,000 - slashing database management requirements. More recently, Big Hammer has successfully tested Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 and is committed to implementing all three platforms once they are publicly released.

"Big Hammer believes that the Unisys enterprise server platform is truly the only platform you can run Microsoft on that has the unique combination of scalability and reliability in a single machine, without doing clustering and a lot of failover," said Jay Yanko, director of Global Data Synchronization and Enterprise Architecture, Big Hammer. "In our opinion, to achieve the uptime we required to fulfill our service level agreements and better serve our own customers, Unisys was the only choice."

"Big Hammer is a strong example of the benefits these security-enhanced technologies are capable of delivering to enterprise customers. Through our collaboration with Unisys, our next-generation capabilities and our strong commitment to virtualization, we can help customers like Big Hammer optimize their infrastructures for a competitive advantage," said Simon Witts, corporate vice president, Enterprise & Partner Group, Microsoft. "Our customers have come to expect a seamless experience from the portfolio of services and software, hardware and prescriptive architecture solutions offered by Unisys and Microsoft. And we are focused on delivering the exceptional customer experience that our clients demand."

Unisys said that benchmark tests demonstrate the power of the joint Unisys and Microsoft solutions. Utilizing a Unisys ES7000 64-core server system, Unisys and Microsoft engineers successfully loaded one terabyte of data using SQL Server 2008 Integration Services in less than 30 minutes -- a new record. Overall, the extract, transform, load (ETL) tools included in SQL Server 2008 performed better than comparable tools from other independent software vendors in similar workloads.

In addition to this ETL benchmark, Unisys and Microsoft recently completed a performance and scalability test of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 on the Unisys ES7000 enterprise server platform. Computers were configured using Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 simulating an environment consisting of 24,000 concurrent users executing more than 169,000 transactions per hour. The benchmark results from this study demonstrated that a single Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 instance on the Unisys ES7000 platform can achieve sub-second response times with a heavy workload against a large, complex database.

Unisys noted that results like these illustrate that Unisys highly-scalable line of servers are one of the world's fastest performing database platforms for SQL Server 2008, and are optimized for delivering pervasive business intelligence.

"Unisys continues to develop solutions aimed at integrating our proven services and server platforms with Windows Server 2008 so that our customers immediately experience the most optimized infrastructure available," said Mark Feverston, vice president, Microsoft Solutions, Unisys. "With the help of Microsoft and Unisys technologies and solutions, Big Hammer Data significantly improved its customers' time-to-decision, enabling faster delivery of critical information to the people who need it, when they need it and how they need it. The combination of our longstanding enterprise focus, experience with Microsoft platforms and scalable architecture make Unisys servers ideal for achieving database scalability with SQL Server 2008."