Unisys Ports OS 2200 Mainframe Operating System to Xeons

Published: May 15, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Mainframe maker Unisys has taken yet another step away from being a mainframe processor developer and toward running its two mainframe platforms on industry standard X64 iron. Today, Unisys will announce that it has ported its OS 2200 operating system for its ClearPath mainframes to Xeon-based servers.

Unisys, as we all know, is the result of the merger between mainframe makers Sperry and Burroughs two decades ago. The ClearPath line, which is several years old, has allowed Unisys mainframe shops to mix and match CMOS-based mainframe processors as well as Xeon-based processors in a single chassis. But for many years, only Windows ran on the Xeon boards in the ClearPath machines; eventually SCO Unix and Linux were added to these cards. OS 2200, the operating system that ran on mainframes made by Sperry, needed its own CMOS mainframe processors until today. A few years ago, the 48-bit MCP operating system that ran on Burroughs-style mainframes was virtualized as MCPvm, slapped atop a hypervisor layer created by Unisys itself, and run atop Windows on Xeon-based server boards in the ClearPath line. (The amazing thing is that this was done before Windows and Xeon chips went from 32-bit to 64-bit processing. Software is an infinitely malleable thing.)

According to Rod Sapp, director of ES servers and storage at Unisys, with today's announcement, Unisys has ported the 36-bit OS 2200 V11.2 release of its operating system to Xeon iron proper. The amazing thing is that Unisys has come up with a means to take code (generally COBOL) originally written and compiled for its Sperry-style processors and allow them to run without recompilation on the new OS 2200 release running on 64-bit Xeon iron. Sapp says that the software Unisys has created maps the CMOS instruction set and OS 2200 APIs for its mainframes to OS 2200 running on Xeon.

The company is not using QuickTransit from Transitive to convert code to run on the new OS 2200, either. "We have our own secret sauce," brags Sapp.

If customers want to move from 36-bit to 64-bit memory support on the new Dorado servers from Unisys, they do have to recompile those applications for the X64 iron, however.

The Dorado servers, which are still available with CMOS engines and in more scalable configurations that offer thousands of MIPS of aggregate processing power, come in two flavors using Intel's dual-core "Tulsa" Xeon 7100 processors. The new Dorado 420 series has a four socket motherboard, and can deliver a total of eight Tulsa cores. Two cores can be ganged up to make a single, virtual OS 2000 core, which is useful for boosting batch performance. (The box can support up to six virtual OS 2200 processors among its eight cores.) The new Xeon-based Dorado machines use the same I/O structure and peripherals as the CMOS-based Dorado 300 series of mainframes.

Sapp says that the Dorado 400 machines span from about 90 MIPS to 400 MIPS in aggregate processing capacity using the Xeon engines. This box is sold like any other modest mainframe server--with a price tag that ranges from $200,000 to millions of dollars. The Dorado 430 model is the same exact hardware, but it is sold using a pay-per-use scheme and has metering software developed by Unisys to reckon how much work customers are making the box do and to then charge them accordingly.

Unisys will also announce today that it has absorbed Intel's quad-core "Clovertown" Xeon DP processors in its Libra 400 mainframes, which run the MCPvm operating system on top of Windows. Unisys is supporting the 2.66 GHz variants of the Clovertowns, and the Libra 400 machines offer from 30 to 350 MIPS of COBOL-crunching power. The Libra 400 has a maximum of 48 GB of memory (using pricey 4 GB DIMMs), of which 32 is usable by MCP, and has six I/O slots offering a mix of PCI-Express and PCI-X peripheral links. The server also has room for eight hot plug SAS disks. The Libra 400 machine comes in entry configurations that cost as little as $32,000 for niche markets where Unisys is trying to protect small accounts--such as at small banks and financial services companies--but the base configurations generally cost about the same as the Xeon-based Dorados, at $200,000 to millions of dollars.

Years ago, Unisys created a native port of Java for its CMOS-based mainframes, but with the new ClearPath boxes announced today, customers can deploy Java on either CMOS engines or Xeon engines, no matter where the MCP or OS 2200 applications are running inside a ClearPath box.

Unisys is, of course, on a journey to consolidate its ES7000 Windows and Linux server line with the Express5800 server line from Japanese development partner NEC. In November 2005, Unisys and NEC launched a broad development agreement that would see Unisys and NEC jointly develop a future server line that supports up to 32 Xeon or Itanium processor sockets. The Dorado and Libra machines that were launched today were not created as part of that development, but rather by Unisys alone. And Unisys is still manufacturing these Dorado and Libra boxes, too. In the long run, NEC will make Unisys boxes as part of their deal, however, which will reduce expenditures.

Over the long haul, Unisys believes that its X64-based mainframes and the X64-compatible versions of the MCP and OS 2200 environments will be sufficient for 95 percent of its customer base. But for now, with a real CMOS mainframe engine from Unisys coming in at around 450 MIPS in the Dorado line, it is going to take some time before this happens.

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