Unisys Engineering Resource Lab (ERL) deployed the Unisys Virtual Orchestration solution for run book automation that streamlines and automates the provisioning of virtual server resources while minimizing operational costs.

ERL is the Unisys organization responsible for provisioning development and test resources. ERL is committed to providing engineers with the best possible service while keeping administrative, operating, and capital costs as low as possible. However, the ERL must respond to a wide range of development and test requirements - from a single server for an individual developer to multiple servers for a major project - and provisioning of physical servers was becoming a real problem.

Now when a VM request is submitted, the entire workflow to provision the server is automated. The uOrchestrate run book confirms that sufficient resources are available, determines which physical system will host the VM, executes the many steps to create the VM, and sends an email to the requestor when the virtual server is available. And, uOrchestrate tracks the "lease" on the VM and asks the requestor for permission to return the resource to the pool after a predetermined period of time.

Unisys went to market in February 2008 with an OEM of Enigmatec Virtual Orchestrator (Unisys Virtual Orchestrator™) and Enigmatec Management System (Unisys uOrchestrate™)

Click here to read a Unisys Virtual Orchestrator Case Study published by Unisys Corporation

Nationwide turned to Enigmatec to help control and manage its rapidly expanding virtual server estate, and improve the efficiency of its servers by enabling more images to be supported by each server.

The integration of Enigmatec's EMS with VMware was the key differentiator for Nationwide. Enigmatec's EMS solution supplied Nationwide's IT staff with an on-demand, self-service portal that maintains and provisions virtual images automatically. The solution has enabled Nationwide to dramatically increase developer productivity by automating the setup and provisioning of developer environments on demand, while still enabling IT operations to manage and control the process through pre-defined policies.

Nationwide is now able to provision and deploy a complete development environment in just 15 minutes, down from a previous time of two hours.

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Since 2006, The Carphone Warehouse has invested aggressively in new data centers for production and non-production systems and adopted virtualisation across the technology spectrum, standardising on VMWare for its Windows and Linux servers and IBM System p APV (advanced power virtualisation) systems for the IBM AIX environment. It has also embraced ITIL and is moving towards accreditation.

The world's largest independent retailer of mobile phones and services, with 2,100 stores in 11 countries, Carphone Warehouse has implemented EMS for full life cycle IT process automation; Enigmatec Automated Disaster Recovery (ADR) for managing fail over to the disaster recovery site; and Enigmatec Virtual Orchestrator (EVO) for provisioning virtual machines requested through a self-service portal.

Simon Post, CTO, The Carphone Warehouse: "This is the most exciting software that I have seen in many years. It's like ERP for IT which will improve the utilisation and efficiency of IT equipment and operations staff throughout the IT life cycle and make sure that IT is better aligned to the business."

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Barclays has deployed EMS to automate identity management and end-user desktop provisioning for thousands of end users.

Through policy-based automation, EMS configures a new user into appropriate Active Directory domains, creates directory shares and mailbox groups, grants access rights to internal systems, and notifies IT operations management of all relevant activities. EMS not only automates what previously were multi-step, error-prone and time-consuming tasks, but enforces approval schemes for every request and activity and creates a full audit trail which is recorded in a relational database.

The IT management burden of new user provisioning is significantly reduced, and policies are strictly enforced with little or no manual intervention. In addition, new policies and workflows are easily created and deployed into the active environment without requiring shutdown.

This major German Investment Bank runs a 24/7 global infrastructure in support of its Financial Services business. Enigmatec EMS was chosen to automate twenty-six core processes around physical and virtual server build, decommission and resource reprocess/recycle.

EMS also automates the process around and between eighteen distinct legacy management tools. Ultimately projected to manage 30,000 servers worldwide, EMS is the foundation for complete system management automation across server life-cycle management, storage provisioning and allocation, network resource allocation, and data metrics for charge back modeling.

As the leading global provider of brand protection for the enterprise, MarkMonitor offers solutions that safeguard brands, reputations and revenues from ever-evolving online risks. MarkMonitor turned to Enigmatec to automate production code roll-out processes to support its large, distributed development organization.

Enigmatec's EMS provides a single, centralized operator view and design environment for MarkMonitor to develop, test, and deploy code management processes. EMS was easily integrated with MarkMonitor's internal build server technologies, application servers, network management tools, schedulers, scripts and CRON jobs in order to provide end-to-end orchestration of the code build and release process.

Using Enigmatec's EMS in its Credit Derivatives operations, JP Morgan is able to dynamically re-purpose and/or re-provision IT resources on-demand to meet the dynamic needs of the business.

EMS automates manual and scripted IT operations procedures, reducing human error and delay. Spare server capacity is dynamically repurposed into business continuity systems and brought up to full production readiness in less time than any set of scripts alone could achieve on dedicated hardware.

Failover is automated as multi-tier applications are automatically migrated to non-dedicated "virtual target" hardware. For example, a fully automated application migration from a NYC midtown production datacenter to capacity-on-demand hardware at one of the firm's disaster recovery sites outside the tri-state area can be completed in 6 minutes with zero data loss. The same process manually takes 2-3 hours, a 95% improvement.

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