Unisys to build its own stealthy cloud

Unisys is dead serious about the secure part, taking a technology called Stealth that it developed and deployed for the U.S. Defense Department and NATO to build what it considers the most secure cloud that will be available on the market. Unisys may have not taken over the world as either a system maker or an outsourcer, but it’s a player in both markets and it doesn’t want the move to cloud computing to leave it behind.

Rich Marcello, president of the Systems and Technology division at Unisys, the Unisys Secure Cloud will initially be based on a mix of the company’s ES7000 family of servers, including homegrown big SMP boxes that it co-designed with NEC as well as rack servers it OEMs from Sun Microsystems Oracle and Dell; storage for the cloud will come from long-time partner EMC.

Unisys cloud will support Clear Path mainframes and their MCP and OS 2200 workloads, but when that might happen, Marcello was unable to say. The Unisys Secure Cloud will be plugged into the company’s existing data centers used by its outsourcing business - that means the cloud will have a global reach, which is something you can bet Unisys will tout to position itself against an army of hosting providers who will suddenly go virtual with their servers and start calling themselves cloud providers.

The initial rollout for PaaS will be a Java stack including Apache, Tomcat, JBoss, and MySQL, but in September the PaaS offering will be extended to include a .NET stack running atop Windows and a WebSphere/DB2 stack for customers who like IBM’s middleware and database. An Oracle database and middleware stack is in the works for this year for the PaaS product, as well Sometime around March 2010 the company will sell hybrid clouds, allowing customers to use Unisys tools to manage workloads that will seamlessly span their internal Unisys clouds and the external Unisys Secure Cloud.

Unisys Secure Cloud will also run more traditional software as a service (SaaS) products that Unisys sells, such as hosted collaboration software or virtual desktops that are served from the cloud. Secure AaaS offering mentioned above means taking customers’ existing applications - the legacy stuff that is hard to move mostly because of paranoia about security - and running them on the Unisys cloud.

Upshot of this bit splitting and encrypting is that Client A on a cloud cannot see Client B’s data unless they have both keys. And because the Stealth protocol is performed by an appliance at the end points of a system, you don’t have to modify an operating system or its applications to make use of it If Unisys can partner with Security First to get the Stealth bit-splitting tech (which Security First calls Secure Parser), then it’s reasonable to assume that others can license it or come up with a similar algorithm.

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