The Kiwis' Alliance Group Chalks Up a Unisys First

Now for some local news, as First Coffee is currently living in northern Aotearoa. New Zealand-based meat processor and exporter, Alliance Group has expanded its 30-year relationship with Unisys (News - Alert) to become, according to the Alliancers, “the first organization in the world to install Unisys’s recently-released ES7000 Model 7405R Enterprise Server.”

 

Under the terms of the agreement, Unisys will supply and install two ES7000 Model 7405R servers and two EMC CX3 Storage Area Networks, and the new servers will be used to replicate the Microsoft (News - Alert) applications hosted at Alliance Group’s production site to its disaster recovery site.

 

Alliance says this will help create business continuity for the company’s Microsoft Windows and Novell (News - Alert) Netware environments.

“The Unisys ES7000 Model 7405R servers will support mission-critical applications, including our e-mail, file and printer servers, along with Web servers that manage customer access to company information,” said Kevin McCrone, chief information officer, Alliance Group.

 

A few weeks ago, TMC reported that Unisys announced that the first U.S. land border crossings using information technology to capture, read and analyze traveler and vehicle information have opened in Blaine, Washington and Nogales, Arizona.

The sites use the Unisys equipment to process secure Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative RFID-enabled travel documents which include U.S. passport cards and alternative documents (enhanced driver's licenses, trusted traveler cards and border crossing cards), designed to minimize delays to travelers – legally – crossing U.S. land borders.

Unisys will support the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency as it rolls out its WHTI RFID product at 37 additional high-volume land ports of entry by June 2009.

 

Alliance Group is a farmer-owned co-operative based in New Zealand that operates nine processing centers nationally and exports to approximately 65 countries. The company produces high-quality meat products from lamb, sheep, cattle and deer, raised by its shareholders using free-range farming practices.

 

It is also one of New Zealand’s largest exporters of wool, pelts, hides, casings, meal and tallow.

The new servers complement the Unisys ClearPath mainframes on which Alliance Group runs enterprise-class solutions. The ES7000 Model 7405R can support multiple operating environments, including Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and 2003 Datacenter, Enterprise and Standard Editions; Microsoft Virtual Server; Red Hat Enterprise Linux; SUSE Linux Enterprise Server; and Sun Microsystems (News - Alert) Solaris 10.