Unisys Delivers a "Real-Time Infrastructure" Using Industry-Standard Components

In October, I was able to briefly escape the cold to attend the Unisys UNITE annual technical conference in Orlando, Florida. There have been many changes at Unisys over the past year as the company continues to try to morph itself into a world-class IT provider, delivering solutions for today’s market. Gone is the emphasis on manufacturing hardware. Unisys now partners with a host of server companies to design and deliver the underlying infrastructure. Unisys claims the current hardware lineup is "best-of-breed" and will evolve over time as new servers hit the market. While Unisys was a niche server vendor in the past, its current server product line looks more like what one would expect to find at HP, IBM, or Dell, with a wide selection of rack, blade, and modular servers.

However, at this particular conference, the action was not on hardware, but rather on a holistic datacenter solution that Unisys calls the "Real-Time Infrastructure." Unisys has leveraged its years of experience with its ClearPath mainframes to develop a strategy for a highly optimized and flexible infrastructure that meets the needs of the next-generation industry-standard datacenter. When properly designed and deployed, Unisys claims its solution delivers standardized management and automation; efficient use of components; flexibility in repurposing and reprioritization; reduced energy and real estate costs; quicker disaster recovery; and the ability to quickly and seamlessly accommodate change. These features align well with the goals most IT departments are trying to achieve today.

At the heart of Unisys’ strategy is a service called 3D Blueprinting, whereby Unisys Services will analyze a customer’s business and model the cause-effect relationships of the workflow within the organization. The completed model consists of four layers – strategy, process, applications and infrastructure. All of these layers are interconnected and a change to one layer will likely have an impact on other layers. Once the model is complete, the customer can clearly visualize the effect of change in any layer – including replacing IT equipment – on other layers. The final goal of the exercise is to align every aspect of the business behind the overall mission of the business.

The next step is to actually design and build the Real-Time Infrastructure. For this, Unisys relies heavily on virtualization provided by third-party vendors. But virtualization is fraught with many challenges that some organizations simply cannot overcome. A large number of virtualization projects stall after the pilot project due to organization, infrastructure, and process challenges. Unisys claims that through its deep experience in this area, it can help clients overcome many of these issues. Unisys has also been quite busy over the past few years developing an impressive set of software tools to assist in provisioning, repurposing, and managing the infrastructure.

uProvision helps to automate change to servers and applications, and is based on a policy-drive approach.

uOrchestrate delivers the ability to define, build, manage, and report IT workflows.

uChargeback allows IT expenses to be allocated across numerous groups within the company.

uAdapt enables rapid repurposing of servers along with associated network and storage connectivity.

uGovern (still under development) will allocate IT resources according to application needs.

IDEAS feels that Unisys is on the right track with its latest approach. Ten years ago, Unisys revolutionized the high-end industry-standard server market with the ES7000. Now it is further blurring the lines between mainframe and industry-standard technology. By commoditizing hardware and moving R&D dollars to management tools, Unisys is emerging as one of the leaders in designing and deploying datacenters for today’s ever changing world using industry-standard technology. If you are considering rearchitecting your datacenter in the coming years, then the Unisys Real-Time Infrastructure is definitely worth investigating.