Unisys Delivers Clustering Solution for Windows

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Unisys this week announced that it has created a new clustering solution for Windows-based versions of its ES7000 Xeon and Itanium server lines, the first in what the company says will be a half-dozen or so solutions in what it is calling its Real-Time Infrastructure Solutions. Like other major IT vendors, Unisys has come to the conclusion that it needs to create and sell IT solutions, not just servers, if it wants to make money.

According to Simon Shiach, vice president of marketing programs for the Systems and Technology group at Unisys, the company has co-opted the "real-time" phrase for these solutions intentionally because it is the same term that is used by Gartner analysts, who have been talking about "real-time enterprises" for the past couple of years. RTE is akin to what IBM is talking about when it says "On Demand" and to what Hewlett-Packard means when it says "Adaptive Enterprise." Basically, it means getting business goals, business processes, application logic, and the underlying infrastructure to be a little less rigid so businesses can be more agile as they try to chase down new revenue opportunities and retain existing business. Unisys has a similar over-arching name for this alignment of IT and business and the boosting of agility, which it calls the 3D Visible Enterprise. That name is not any more important than On Demand or Adaptive Enterprise, and I only bring it up so you know what it is when you hear it. What does matter is building solutions, and that is what the RTI products at Unisys are actually about. It's the difference between strategy and tactics, or marketing and product, depending on how kind you feel like being when you hear these initiatives.

According to surveys done by Unisys of companies with at least $250 million in annual sales and who spend at least $1 million a year on their data centers--the core ES7000 buyer--some 55 percent of those surveyed had downtime incidents in the past year, and 30 percent had an incident that knocked out both their primary and secondary systems. This RTI solution is designed to address the need for higher uptime.

Because the vast majority of its customers are running Windows 2000 Advanced Server or Datacenter Server or Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition, the first RTI solution that Unisys is rolling out is called the Business Continuance SafeGuard 30m Series. Simply put, the technicians at Unisys have worked with an unnamed third party to create a high availability remote clustering solution that the company says is a lot cheaper than some of the options on the market today. Specifically, Unisys has taken a bundle of ES7000 servers running Windows that are attached to storage area networks for a production environment, and mirrored that setup in a disaster recovery center, and then put special appliances (that is the part that Unisys won't name) that replicate data from the production server to a remote appliance that front-ends the standby system. These appliances are used in lieu of remote disk mirroring capabilities in high-end disk arrays from EMC, IBM, and Hitachi. In addition, the solution provides system clustering on the ES7000 servers through Microsoft Cluster Services. Shiach says that this RTI solution can cost 70 percent less than using the features inside high-end disk arrays. Unisys has tested the offering to reach over 3,000 miles and is guaranteeing that the auxiliary systems can be up and running after a failure knocks out the primary servers within 30 minutes. (That's the 30m part of the solution's name.) "When you get the recovery time down below 30 minutes, this is what usually costs customers a lot of money to achieve," explains Shiach.

The Business Continuance SafeGuard 30m is currently restricted to the Windows platform, but last year Unisys said it would support Linux as well on the ES7000s and a version of this disaster recovery offering is being readied for the Linux platform for later this year.

Unisys is working on other RTI solutions, particularly ones that package up tools that help with dynamic provisioning and virtualization of servers; add security to systems; copy with enterprise content management; and reduce the complexity of IT platforms through server consolidation and migration of applications to a smaller number of platforms. Shiach singled out future database RTI solutions pegged to Oracle and SQL Server databases (specifically, migrating from Oracle on Unix to Oracle or SQL Server on Linux or Windows). The Oracle migration solutions will include all of the hardware, software, tools, and services that make the migrations go more smoothly.