Unisys ClearPath Mainframes Gain Home-Grown Virtualisation

Unisys is bringing its own virtualisation technology to its mainframe systems, giving businesses what one company official called an “enterprise-class” virtualisation solution.

Unisys unveiled its sPar (secure partitioning) technology on its Intel-based ClearPath mainframes, offering enterprises greater and more consistent performance and security in virtualised environments. That is crucial, given the types of workloads that run on these machines, according to Bill MacLean, vice president of ClearPath portfolio management for Unisys.

Guaranteed Service Levels

With sPar, businesses can guarantee service levels and greatly reduce the risk of downtime when compared with other virtualisation technologies from the likes of VMware and Citrix Systems, MacLean said in an interview with eWEEK.

“If you’re dealing with enterprise-level applications… you can’t have those kinds of risks in the system,” he said.

Unisys also introduced two new midrange ClearPath models which will feature the sPar technology: the Libra 4100 Series running the CMOS operating system and Dorado 4100 Series running the OS 2200 platform.

The sPar virtualisation solution takes advantage of special-purpose processors known as speciality engines. Like the speciality engines IBM uses in its System z mainframes, those in Unisys’ ClearPath systems are designed to offload particular tasks from the primary Intel Xeon processors. The ClearPath ePortal for MCP and ePortal for OS 2200 enables workers to access the mainframe resources from such devices as Apple iPhones and iPads.

The JProcessor speciality engine is aimed at Java workloads and Crypto offers extra levels of data encryption for high-security applications. The QProcessor enables enhanced information exchange between systems using IBM’s WebSphere MQ Server messaging.

The sPar technology can divide the system into four separate partitions based on the primary Xeon processor and three speciality engines. A key differentiator for Unisys is that each partition – with dedicated processors, memory and I/O capabilities – essentially is a full, secure server, MacLean said.  That compares to virtualisation solutions from vendors like VMware which, when running in distributed environments, portions out parts of a processor and networking resources to virtual machines, he said.

With sPar, “there’s no sharing [of resources],” MacLean said. Each partition owns all the resources and all are managed by the ClearPath operating system. In addition, communications between the components run at memory speed, which is faster than over traditional network connections, he said.

“The commodity technologies out there simply won’t meet the requirements of mission-critical applications,” MacLean said.

The Libra 4100 Series will be the first mainframes to offer the sPar technology. The technology will arrive later on the Dorado 4100 systems, where sPar is part of the architecture but not yet qualified, MacLean said.

The Libra 4100 mainframes – four-socket systems running six-core Xeon 7500 chips – offer significant improvements in performance over the current 4000 Series, according to Unisys. Single-image capacity increases from 800 to 1,750 MIPs, and singe-processor performance from 200 to 300 MIPs.

Networking and storage capabilities are also improved in the new systems which additionally offer mirrored memory and redundant hot-plug power and cooling, MacLean said.