Unisys announces Forward! by Unisys

Unisys Corporation has announced its new Forward!™ by Unisys enterprise computing platform – a breakthrough fabric-based solution that brings unmatched levels of mission-critical security, availability, scalability and predictable computing performance to workloads running on Intel-based servers.

The new platform, initially announced at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2013, combines Unisys’ advanced secure partitioning (s-Par®) technology with Intel® Xeon® family processors and virtualisation technology into a powerful, secure, highly flexible fabric architecture able to handle clients’ most demanding mission-critical computing challenges on an industry-standard platform.

Available for delivery in early December, the Forward! by Unisys platform is ideal for organisations looking to migrate to open Linux and Windows operating environments from expensive proprietary Unix environments; run secure cloud and big data workloads; boost the performance of ERP applications such as SAP; and address server sprawl by consolidating data centre resources.

To help organisations realise the value of the Forward! platform, Unisys is also offering extensive consulting services, including planning, design and implementation, as well as services for specific use cases: Unix-to-Linux applications migration, SAP applications and platform migration, and data centre consolidation.

Unisys estimates that, compared to competitive Unix systems, the Forward! platform can cut capital expenses by between 50 to 60 percent and reduce total cost of ownership by up to 40 percent and compared to physical Linux or Windows environments, a partitioned Forward! platform can eliminate up to 70 percent of physical servers and reduce software licensing and hardware maintenance costs by as much as 70 percent. The Forward! by Unisys platform also increases organisational speed by cutting server provisioning time for mission-critical workloads from weeks to hours.
The Forward! by Unisys platform provides these benefits while delivering mission-critical levels of security and predictability compared to standard virtualised environments.

“The new Forward! by Unisys platform breaks the paradigm for enterprise-class computing,” said Ed Coleman, Unisys chairman and CEO. “Organisations no longer need to choose between the predictability and security of proprietary systems and the flexibility and cost savings of Linux and Windows systems. With Forward! by Unisys, they can choose one platform for their mission-critical workloads that gives them the performance and security that they need today while providing the flexibility to manage new applications and disruptive technologies as they emerge.”

Developed by Unisys in cooperation with Intel Corporation, the Forward! platform addresses an estimated aggregate market of more than $23 billion for cloud computing, big data and Unix-RISC migration.

Breaking Down the Barriers to Mission-Critical Computing
An April 2013 survey of IT decision makers conducted for Unisys by IDG showed that concerns about performance and security were the key impediments to migrating mission-critical applications to a virtualized environment.

With its use of secure partitioning technology, media-agnostic high-speed interconnects and unified system management capabilities, the Forward! platform addresses those concerns by providing the flexibility and cost benefits of virtualisation with the predictable performance of proprietary Unix systems.

Within a Forward! fabric platform, each secure partition constitutes a “containerised” server for execution of a specific workload, with its own dedicated processing, memory, and I/O channels. Dedicating resources to each partition eliminates the resource contention and latency that can hamper systems using virtualisation alone. Communications among the secure partitions occur at memory speed and are inherently secure in that a fault in one partition does not affect others.

As an extra measure of mission-critical security, the Forward! fabric platform can be integrated with the Unisys Stealth™ cybersecurity solution. Unisys Stealth uses advanced data cloaking and encryption techniques to render applications, data and devices virtually invisible on the network. Whenever an administrator provisions a partition, he or she can simultaneously provision a Stealth security infrastructure for that partition, enabling only authorized users to see and access the cloaked resources.

All of the nodes of a Forward! fabric are connected through high-speed InfiniBand links that reduce latency and enhance failover capabilities. Nodes including different generations of computing resources, as well as server nodes in different locations worldwide, can be added to the Forward! fabric architecture to create a system that is virtually limitless in scalability and power.

Unlike commodity hypervisors, the Forward! software environment provides single-pane management of individual platforms and partitions, interconnects, internal storage in the fabric and the extended computing infrastructure.

Initially, the Forward! platform uses Intel Xeon E5 processors. Unisys intends to base future models on Intel Xeon E7 processors. The Forward! fabric platform capitalizes on a range of Intel’s high-performance, availability and security innovations for the Xeon processor family, including PCI Express Generation 3 (PCIe 3.0) for enhanced I/O and bandwidth, Turbo Boost Technology 2.0 for power-efficient high performance and Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (AES NI) for high-volume encryption.