Unisys Tweaks Its ClearPath Mainframes, Too

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Although the field of players has diminished, IBM is not the only mainframe supplier these days and it was not the only vendor that revamped its mainframe line in recent weeks. Unisys has also tweaked its Clearpath mainframe line and, like IBM, has seen its mainframe business stabilize as big customers continue to consume lots of MIPS.

I spoke to Chander Khanna, general manager of Unisys' ClearPath solutions and services business unit, prior to the impending IBM System z9 announcements, which was also when (unbeknownst to me) Unisys was cooking up some enhancements to its Clearpath Plus Libra--which I still think of as the Burroughs MCP-based mainframes--as well as building out the utility computing features of the Clearpath platform (which also includes the OS2200-based Clearpath Dorado machines that are derived from the Sperry/Univac side of Unisys).

While Unisys does not break out its product line revenues by line in its financial reports, Khanna was keen on demonstrating (to the extent that he is allowed by regulations regarding fair disclosure) that like IBM, Unisys has not seen its mainframe business dry up, even after more than a decade and a half of commercialized Unix and a decade of commercialized Windows servers. He said the Clearpath Libra product line has done particularly well in recent years, growing revenues by around 3 percent in an IT market that was growing at between 5 percent and 6 percent. The Clearpath Dorado line has seen flat revenues in the past five years or so, but Khanna is hopeful that recent changes to the product line and a swing back toward centralized, virtualized systems running at high utilization--as opposed to a sprawl of Unix and Windows servers running at low utilization--could help the Dorado line see some growth looking ahead. He also said that on both product lines, MIPS shipped into customer accounts continue to grow. This is very similar to the curve that IBM's own zSeries mainframe business has seen, which stands to reason because both Unisys and IBM have done a lot of work to make their respective mainframe product lines more relevant and more open to new workloads to help bolster their sales.

Unisys is somewhat different from IBM, however, in that it has been aggressively pursuing a consolidated hardware strategy. The advent of the ES7000 Wintel mainframes back in late 2000 was nothing more than Unisys taking its experience in creating mainframes and creating a server architecture called Cellular MultiProcessing (CMP) that allowed Unisys to create the first big boxes to run Microsoft's Windows 2000 Server Datacenter Edition. Since that time, the Clearpath mainframes have adopted technologies that are based heavily on the ES7000 frames, albeit with custom mainframe engines (which are actually fabbed by IBM, ironically) instead of Intel's Xeon and Itanium processors. And in some cases--with the MCP platform, to be specific--Unisys has ported its mainframe environment to run on Intel X86 processors. "We've been able to get more and more hardware convergence," explained Khanna. "But this has become less and less important to many customers, even though it is important to Unisys as a manufacturer." How far Unisys will push convergence--will it port OS2200 to Intel iron and reduce itself to the single ES7000 platform running on 64-bit Xeon and/or Itanium processors?--Khanna is not saying, and he changes the subject when asked, just as Big Blue does when you ask about the rumored "Project ECLipz" to consolidate the iSeries, pSeries, and zSeries hardware platforms onto one Power-based server hardware platform. "Where customers are seeing benefits of our consolidation is in the operating systems and software they can put onto the machines."

Specifically, Unisys has ported the Java runtime environment to all of its machines--Clearpath Libra and Dorado as well as ES7000s--and has partnered with JBoss to deliver a single Java application server layer that spans these platforms as they run MCP, OS2200, Windows, and Linux. Unisys also allows Clearpath customers to plug X86 server boards into their mainframe machines, and they can run Windows or Linux on these boards. This is akin to IBM supporting Linux on its mainframe processors in that either way, mainframe customers are adding MIPS to their mainframes to drive these non-mainframe operating systems. But perhaps most importantly, the support for Java is a way to keep customers who are using MCP and OS2200 on Clearpath servers and thinking about deploying Java-based applications on those Clearpath platforms. Moreover, the support for Java might even mean that existing and new Java workloads that might have ended up on other boxes get pulled onto the Clearpaths. The Java support is also bringing new software vendors to the Clearpath installed base--many probably didn't exist a decade ago and probably had no idea what a mainframe was when they were founded.

Unisys has also been pushing utility pricing as a differentiator for the Clearpath lines with its pay per use pricing options; the company is working on a new thing called pay per service pricing (due later this year), which will charge customers for usage based on the dominant metrics they use to measure their own success--customer accounts, transactions processed, and so forth. While IBM offers MSU pricing on software, you have to activate processors at the core level. Since March 2004, Unisys has been offering utility pricing on hardware that works in 25 MIPS increments, and now it can offer granularity on processor pricing down to the 1 MIPS level. Pay per service will take utility pricing one step further and get customers out of thinking about MIPS and into thinking about their business. "The pay per service offering will be more like a cell phone plan than a traditional way to buy servers," said Khanna. "It will be true, flexible pricing."

Because Unisys is not interested in getting into a MIPS battle with IBM--IBM ships bigger single OS images, but only the biggest mainframe shops care. Unisys is, however, keen on putting a lot of MIPS in one box. Unisys also wants to offer similar price/performance on its mainframes compared to IBM's zSeries because both sets of boxes run COBOL, which is somewhat portable across the platforms. "We no longer believe that capacity and raw performance remain the primary concern of today's mainframe customer," said Khanna. "That race is over and, quite frankly, everybody has won. Business flexibility, high utilization of capital equipment, reduced cost and the ability to pay for what is needed when it is needed will be the foundation for the next great battles in mainframe computing."

As an example, Khanna cited a comparison the company had put together to support a Java application at a big online retailer. A setup based on Sun Fire servers from Sun Microsystems, running the Solaris variant of Unix and a J2EE middleware stack, cost $2.2 million, while a similarly powerful solution based on JBoss running on the Clearpath Dorado mainframes cost a little bit more at $2.5 million. However, when you looked at server utilization--which was much higher on the mainframes--and other factors in terms of operating the solution, Khanna said the mainframe box that cost a few hundred thousand dollars to buy ended up saving the customer millions of dollars in operational costs.

This is why, he says, Unisys has mainframe product roadmaps that run out to 2015, and it is why Unisys continues to sell mainframes--just like IBM.

And to that end, Unisys has to tweak its product line from time to time, and it did so recently. Specifically, Unisys has added a new variant of the Clearpath family that looks to be a baby ES7000 running the MCP platform, which is called the Libra 300. The machine comes with either two or four "Cranford" Xeon MP processors, which run at either 3.16 GHz or 3.66 GHz; these chips have 1 MB of cache, have 64-bit memory addressing, and a 667 MHz front side bus. The Libra 300 supports the Virtual Machine for Clearpath MCP (MCPvm) virtualization environment, which can host Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition or MCP inside these partitions. The Libra 300 spans from 20 to 300 MIPS in mainframe performance, according to Unisys, and supports up to 64 GB of main memory (with 1 GB usable by MCP itself). It has three PCI-X slots and four PCI-Express slots for I/O expansion.

On the utility front, Unisys has also announced the Libra 595, its new high-end MCP-based mainframe with pay per use pricing as the only pricing mechanism. The Libra 595 mainframes have had their I/O boosted by 20 percent compared to the prior generation of Libra 590s, but it is unclear if the MCP CMOS mainframe engines have been sped up with this announcement. The Libra 595 can support up to 32 processor modules and up to 32 partitions in a system complex; mainframe and Intel engines can be mixed in the box. The MCP modules come with four CMOS mainframe engines per board, while the Intel boards pack either four or eight of the Cranford Xeon MPs onto a single board. A maximum of 128 mainframe engines can be put into the Libra 595, and if customers wanted to, they could put only four mainframe engines in the box and 248 Xeon engines running Windows, Linux, or MCPvm with MCP running inside. On the mainframe engines, MCP can span a maximum of 16 processors. So, in theory, the Libra 595 can house as many as eight native MCP instances and 15 MCP instances running on Xeons plus one native running on a mainframe board.

Using only native MCP mainframe engines, the Libra 595 spans from about 20 to 3,800 MIPS per native MCP partition, yielding an aggregate of 60,800 MIPS. (Remember, you can't bring this all to bear on a single workload, and remember further that IBM's new System z9 will perhaps bring 17,800 MIPS to bear on a single z/OS image, if IBM can pull that off.) Each MCPvm partition with four Xeon processors tops out at 300 MIPS. So, to make this clear: IBM has a bigger single system mainframe operating system image, but Unisys is packing a whole lot more punch in a single frame than IBM does and, further, Unisys assumes that customers will consolidate MCP, Windows, and Linux workloads onto these big boxes. Each MCP module requires 4 GB of physical memory, and the machine tops out at 64 GB of physical memory. The Libra 585 is a variant of this server that comes with standard pricing rather than pay-per-use pricing.