Unisys ClearPath Forward Fabric Based Platform to Power the Weather Enterprise

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1 Unisys ClearPath Forward Fabric Based Platform to Power the Weather Enterprise Introducing Unisys All in One software based weather platform designed to reduce server space, streamline operations, consolidate server and networking management, and provide a flexible and scalable system for enterprise scale weather IT environments. ClearPath Forward TM also includes opportunity for tighter integration with business and mission environments leveraging massive weather and non-weather data in a highly secure configuration Virtualization and Cloud does not do it all. White Paper

2 An ever growing number of businesses and organizations rely on accurate, real-time, and predictive weather and non-weather information to improve operations, increase profits, optimize planning and schedules, and/or protect life and property. Alongside this growth sits the challenge of IT to gather and process data in a timely, accurate and efficient manner while providing the flexibility and scalability of ever increasing amounts of data. Unisys has long been a global leader in enterprise scale computing through the support of extremely high volume data processing systems, associated IT services and service management, and innovative methods for clients to reduce costs, secure their environments, and modernize their applications. We have combined our decades of experience in weather data processing and distribution with our operational IT platforms to introduce the first ever software defined weather data center running on Unisys ClearPath Forward TM

3 Recognizing the Need to Shift The past decade has seen a transformational shift in enterprise computing. Gigabit networks, open source platforms, multicore processors, flash storage, and software based virtualization has changed the way data centers operate. For the weather enterprise, adaptation and migration from legacy systems has been a slow process. Virtualization has enabled enterprises to spin up new platforms and spur new development, but traditional software virtualization has its limitations, especially when it comes to the requirements of ingesting and processing weather data. Unisys has established itself as a Gartner Magic Quadrant* leader in for Data Center Outsourcing and Infrastructure Utility Services. In addition, Unisys maintains and operates a world class weather data center with experience and knowledge in enterprise class weather information services and technology. To that end, we have combined forces to develop the next generation weather enterprise platform configured specifically for high bandwidth, multicore processing applications that require no downtime. In addition, we have made it easier to transition applications from proprietary architectures to an x86 platform while preserving the robustness, security, and scalability of a proprietary processor. What is ClearPath Forward? ClearPath Forward is a highly-scalable, agile, fabric based computing solution designed to provide the predictable performance and security required by mission critical applications. ClearPath Forward is imbued with decades of mission critical Unisys expertise and architected in a fabric based infrastructure leveraging industry standard x86 platforms. Unisys delivers ClearPath Forward as a tightly integrated Fabric based infrastructure which includes: Unisys secure partitioning for complete isolation, predictable performance, and security of workloads not available with standard x86 virtualization technologies. Intel Xeon based commodity platforms for lowering life cycle costs. Interconnect software with high-speed InfiniBand media for sharply increased data exchange capacity. Unified system management and automation with ClearPath Forward Fabric Management for simplification of IT environment management. Support for industry leading hypervisor, Docker and Cloud. These capabilities provide enterprise-class security, predictable performance, virtually unlimited scalability, and faster time-to-value by integrating existing environments on the high-speed ClearPath Forward fabric. Run missioncritical applications with confidence on Linux and Windows operating environments. ClearPath Forward Powering the Weather Enterprise Unisys Weather manages a world class data center with emphasis on redundancy, accuracy and reliability. We provide system and software engineering geared specifically toward the weather enterprise through decades of experience building managed solutions for NOAA, FAA, and industry partners. Unisys Weather develops custom solutions by working collaboratively with customers to deliver fully functional and flexible products and services. Unisys Weather was one of the first business units to leverage the power of a Unisys ClearPath Forward platform by migrating several critical applications from existing multi-platform hardware environment to a single ClearPath Forward node. This resulted in a vast reduction of data center hardware and space, a consolidation of various Local Area Networks (LANs) into a single managed network, and the ability to manage various high performance applications onto one physical x86 system with no loss of performance. For any weather enterprise, there are three major components of the architecture. Unisys has successfully demonstrated the capability of ClearPath Forward to manage: Data Ingest: Weather information begins with the ingest of raw or structured weather data and products (NOAAPort and other sources). These typically include observations, radar images, satellite data and imagery, gridded products such as models and analyses, and unstructured data such as upper air and aircraft observations. Unisys ClearPath Forward is designed to handle high input/output via The Interconnect, which is a combination of media agnostic software, hardware media InfiniBand, and firmware *Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Data Center Outsourcing and Infrastructure Utility Services, North America, William Maurer, David Edward Ackerman, Christine Tenneson, 28 July 2015.

4 interlinking the platforms and the partitions within them. The Interconnect hides the underlying connection technology from the applications and operating systems in the partitions. Weather Is Big Data : New satellites, sensors, radars, and models have and will cause an unprecedented rise in the amount of data and products available for the weather enterprise. Combining those with non-traditional weather sources (such as video feeds and social media posts) provides a very rich source of data to glean valuable insights and information. ClearPath Forward delivers an integrated Big Data Analytics platform that is highly secure and optimized with Hadoop cluster and analytics engine running in s-par partitions. The predictable performance behavior of partitioned environment via dedicated resources is designed to provide business critical decisions accuracy and predictions. The big bandwidth via high speed interconnect across Hadoop nodes and analytics engine drives greater performance for parallel search query results and data exchange across platforms and partitions. Data Processing: The creation of useful products which provide weather information such as current conditions and forecasts must be derived from a set of series of observations combined with complex scientific algorithms. Each piece of information must be processed by an application to create a piece of the puzzle which may be fed to secondary applications or assembled with other information to create a finished product. Unisys ClearPath Forward provides unique capabilities to handle multiple processing applications on the same physical server without sacrificing resources that more traditional virtualization or container technologies endure. With ClearPath Forward, resources among operating systems and partitions are not shared. This provides a uniquely stable platform which guarantees application performance across the system: Database Optimization: Weather data for database driven applications is typically segregated on its own server due to the volatile nature of the data. High I/O, exceptional number of transactions, and refresh rates (less than a minute in many cases) require very powerful databases with multiple cores. With Unisys ClearPath Forward, neighboring workloads residing in different partitions on the same physical server do not impact each other: Data and Product Storage and Distribution: Product distribution and delivery represents another challenge for weather IT environments. Critical information can only be useful if delivered to the application or the end user with speed, accuracy, and integrity. In a typical data center environment, the distribution servers reside on separate physical networks which are enabled with access to the open internet, requiring expensive hardware and enterprise grade firewalls to protect the other parts of the system from threats and intrusions. The ClearPath Forward by Unisys fabric delivers a secure and predictive environment to consolidate mission critical and other applications. It enables the flexibility of virtualization combined with the security of physical infrastructure. ClearPath Forward fabric provides secure isolated partitions for virtualized performance without the worries of cloud performance. ClearPath Forward fabric also helps reduce infrastructure costs through consolidation *Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Data Center Outsourcing and Infrastructure Utility Services, North America, William Maurer, David Edward Ackerman, Christine Tenneson, 28 July 2015.

5 Unisys ClearPath Forward TM as part of Unisys Weather Operations Unisys Weather supports aviation, transportation, energy, value added resellers, retail businesses, local governments and the Federal Government through a dedicated central weather data hub and center operating 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. Our weather products and services underpin mission critical applications and operations, therefore we have built in redundancy and reliability to support client Service Level Agreements (SLA) up to 99.9%. Unisys Weather was the first to design, deploy and maintain a Unisys ClearPath Forward system running all stacks of a typical weather processing system. Candidate ingest, processing, storage, and distribution applications were selected and migrated to individual s-par partitions on a ClearPath Forward for test and evaluation. These applications included high transactional, high data volume applications requiring multiple processing cores. The results immediately showed the advantage of using ClearPath Forward s innovative secure partitioning over standard virtualization: Seven physical servers were reduced to a single 1U ClearPath Forward server. Idle time for processing was reduced significantly with reduced number of cores needed for high volume data processing. Peak processing for high computational applications had zero effect on neighboring partitions. Provisioning time for OS partitions were reduced from hours to minutes. Hardware required for networking and switching was vastly reduced by using software defined VLANs and fabric based micro-segmentation. Rethink the Way Mission Critical Applications Are Deployed Technologies such as virtualization have reduced server sprawl by increasing the utilization of physical servers. However, the various applications are not completely isolated, which may lead to data vulnerability and performance problems. Consolidating into a ClearPath Forward environment brings many advantages Mission Critical Features: Predictable performance Isolated partitioning with dedicated hardware resources Increased application and network performance Effective and simpler system management Scalability Fast Interconnect Enhanced security through micro-segmentation of interconnect transfers and partition isolation. Predicted Cost Savings Through: Reduced number of servers and maintenance contracts Reduced software licensing, software maintenance, and hardware maintenance requirements Simplified system management Effective and simpler disaster recovery and backup implementations. Technology Transition There is no need to abandon current architecture. ClearPath Forward can be transitioned into the current architecture and its capability leveraged for capacity growth and/or for planning legacy system retirement. This is what we are doing in the Unisys Weather data center under change management and system testing protocol. The training and practice from delivery of system to operation is a matter of a few weeks based on our experience using the GUI tools provided with the hardware.

6 Hardened Security with Unisys s-par With the advent of common virtualization on x86 machines to consolidate data centers and reduce costs and management, enterprises may introduce vulnerabilities across an entire physical server and all its simultaneous virtual machines (VMs). ClearPath Forward uses Unisysdeveloped s-par hardened partitions for multiple server instances on a single x86 platform. Each secure partition acts as a physically independent, self-contained server, with its own CPUs, operating system (OS), boot area, memory, and I/O subsystem, unlike common virtualization architectures that share resources. Under common virtualization architectures, if the hypervisor or any hosted VM is compromised, the entire server and all its VM instances can be affected. This cannot occur with s-par using new micro-segmentation technology. Also, because s-par s hardened partitions share no unsecured resources, it is correspondingly more difficult to leak information between them. Even in the unlikely event that an application or OS in an s-par partition is hacked or infected, it cannot breach the security of neighboring s-par partitions or the host. This means corporations can reap the full benefits of server consolidation yet retain and even improve the security they would enjoy using dedicated servers for each critical application. Unisys s-par relies on the hardware isolation mechanisms provided by the Intel Xeon processor and chipset technologies including VT-x2 supporting processor and memory virtualization and VT-d for I/O support

7 For more information visit Unisys Corporation. All rights reserved. Unisys and other Unisys products and services mentioned herein, as well as their respective logos, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Unisys Corporation. All other trademarks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners. Printed in the United States of America 11/2015