New Unisys Mainframe Aims To Help Migrate Legacy Infrastructure

The Libra 185 includes the infrastructure needed for metered provisioning of computing resources, said Rod Sapp, director of ClearPath marketing.

The metered provisioning capability, which isn't expected to be available for another six months or so, differs from traditional capacity-on-demand models in that the extra processing and memory are always available and can be turned on as needed without requiring the purchase of a software key, Sapp said. Instead, customers are charged a baseline monthly fee based on about triple the needed performance available, and are charged extra for spikes in processing requirements over the base settings, he said.

The company is also adding .Net and J2EE support to its Enterprise Application Environment development toolset, Sapp said. Extended Web services support comes from the server's support for XML, SOAP, UDDI and other standards. Performance and memory capability have also been enhanced from previous versions of the ClearPath servers, he said.

The new metering capability, combined with the Java and standards support, is specifically aimed at bringing Sun Microsystems customers to the Unisys platform, said Sapp. "We use metering to level the playing field against Sun's UltraSPARC servers," he said. "We can adjust the performance level to what customers need so they can get the same price/performance as if they use Sun [server], but with improved management capabilities."

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Unisys' Blueprinting initiative includes services designed to help customers understand their current business processes and identify redundancies, design an optimized IT blueprint based on their specific industry's best practices, and map their needs to the blueprint, Sapp said.

The company is looking for partners to resell these services to their customers, he said. "We want the reseller to take part in the business transformation process," Sapp said. "They can resell the mainframe along with business processes developed by the reseller and Java," he said.