Unisys Corp. this week released a business continuity system for its Intel-based ES7000 Windows servers, saying the technology will allow fail-over to a backup site thousands of miles away and recovery within 30 minutes.

The system, called SafeGuard 30m, is the first in a series of offerings Unisys officials said will be released in the coming months under the company"s broad Real-Time Infrastructure initiative, also announced this week. RTI, which is philosophically similar to the on-demand and adaptive computing concepts advocated by other IT vendors, will include tools for infrastructure management, consolidation, modeling and migration.

SafeGuard 30m leverages Microsoft Corp."s clustering software, but Unisys added its own software and hardware to create a turnkey system intended to address one of the challenges of long-distance data replication.

Business continuity systems often use synchronous data transfers at the disaster recovery site, but network latency limits synchronous transfer distances to about 186 miles. Unisys said its approach also permits asynchronous transfers that mitigate data loss over long distances by adding disk-writing appliances and monitoring capabilities.

Depending on the size of the deployment, SafeGuard 30m costs US$200,000 to $1.2 million, Unisys said.

One ES7000 user, Larry Godec, CIO at First American Title Insurance Co., said he"s already using EMC Corp."s Symmetrix Remote Data Facility software to replicate data from First American"s headquarters in Santa Ana, Calif., to a data center in Dallas. EMC"s technology also supports both synchronous and asynchronous replication. "I"m not sure how Unisys could offer anything faster," Godec said.

Unisys said the RTI suite will include features such as dynamic provisioning and virtualization. But what Larry Mueller, director of information systems operations for the Montebello Unified School District in California, really wants is for Unisys to improve the vertical scalability of the ES7000, which he runs with 16 processors.

Mueller said multiple applications running on one instance of Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition sometimes conflict. That forces him to separate the applications into partitions and run another instance of the operating system.

The RTI road map doesn"t include the huge installed base of the vendor"s older product lines. But separately, Unisys has an ongoing effort to help users modernize their ClearPath mainframe systems, which run the OS 2200 and MCP operating systems.

Greg Schweizer, a lead developer and systems administrator at Oregonian Publishing Co. in Portland, is upgrading the newspaper"s ClearPath-based circulation system by adding a Unisys middleware layer and Web server to deliver the application to browsers. The project reduces costs, he said, because instead of the company paying for dedicated terminals and phone lines, circulation workers can access the system over any Internet connection.

Unisys officials have promised that the company will continue to support its legacy systems, and Schweizer said he believes that will be the case. But he expressed concern about the company"s financial performance: Unisys this month reported a first-quarter net loss of $45.5 million, as revenue fell 7 percent year over year.