Unisys goes for Xeon, Itanium and virtualisation on new breed of servers

Bob Hawkins, marketing director for Europe, made the announcement at a briefing for analysts. “We’re looking at a long term transition to full implementation on a pure Intel basis,” he said. “Intel technology has matured. We started to deliver on Intel a few years ago, but now we feel confident enough for all our installed base.” It’s not just a ‘following the pack’ move to wall-to-wall Intel. Unisys is also introducing what it terms a ‘next-generation server architecture’ aimed at very scalable enterprise computing, and also facilitating on-demand ‘pay per business’ use. The deal: Intel Xeon and Itanium technology brings mission-critical, mainframe-class computing to Microsoft and open source users. But beneath that, Unisys has invested in its own brand of virtualisation to run its Clearpath operating environment but also Windows and Linux etc on the same virtualised system partition. “There are many virtualisation players out there,” concedes Colin Lacey, VP of Unisys enterprise server group, “but we have developed our own because they’re not optimised to scale up applications. Our systems will dedicate many processors to a single application if that’s what’s needed.” Unisys integrated virtualisation and management capabilities enable sharing of application workloads dynamically based on user-defined business rules. Indeed, the company says it expects the new architecture to outpace most of the industry in server processing power.