Pushing ClearPath – and AB Suite – Forward

Welcome to the era of ClearPath Forward™.

In a move designed to unite the best of two worlds into one, ClearPath Forward blends established ClearPath® strengths and new innovations with the engineering ingenuity behind the Forward! by Unisys™ enterprise computing platform.

As a result of this change, what we had referred to as “the fabric” will now be known as ClearPath Forward. But this is much more than a simple name change: with ClearPath Forward, we’re extending the capabilities of the fabric-based infrastructure with new features designed to add more value to the ClearPath environment.

And in doing so, we’ve strengthened the integration between the ClearPath MCP and Microsoft® Windows® environments, making it possible for the multiple elements within the Agile Business Suite (AB Suite™) application landscape – the core of which runs on MCP, while other aspects run on Windows – to function much more elegantly and provide the advanced capabilities your organization needs to excel.

A More Secure Fabric

With the secure fabrics included in ClearPath Forward, it’s easier to share data in near real time between ClearPath systems and Windows servers, leading to better agility, responsiveness, and time to value.

Secure fabrics make this possible by allowing you to segment and isolate traffic over the environment’s high-speed interconnect, which is currently 56Gb Sixteen Data Rate (SDR) InfiniBand. This creates dedicated data lanes that subdivide quality of service and deliver predictable, secure communication for both virtualized and partitioned workloads.

Virtualization, Extended

ClearPath Forward streamlines virtual environments and helps to boost workload density by offering a plug-in that integrates with VMware® vCenter™ and enables you to manage, stop, and start Windows and Linux® partitions directly from vCenter. You get a streamlined, single-pane-of-glass management and user experience – as well as the ability to view the status of these partitions right in the vCenter portal, helping you unify management across environments.

Additionally, the SUSE and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® operating systems supported by ClearPath Forward now allow Linux containers to be implemented using Docker® software. Blueprints and gold images for the supported Linux operating systems include the code modules that make them ready to support Docker containers.

Increased Flexibility

In addition to delivering increased control, greater predictability, and simplified management, ClearPath Forward significantly expands on the high levels of flexibility already available in the ClearPath environment.

In addition to your host MCP environment, you now have the option to divide each system’s Enterprise Partitionable Platform (EPP) into a maximum of 36 unique environments, allowing all of the many Windows elements required to create an AB Suite application to be deployed within the ClearPath Forward environment.

Increasing the number of available partitions also gives you more ways to utilize the deliverables offered under the ClearPath Software Series umbrella. For instance, you could deploy multiple instances of ClearPath MCP Developer Studio and use these unique development environments to stage different MCP releases, test application updates, or provide individual development resources to your team.

So now, you have the freedom to create as many MCP development environments as you have EPPs. One could include an AB Suite 4.0 solution in MCP 16.0. Right next to it could be a test partition for the same solution, but on AB Suite 5.0 running in the MCP 17.0 environment. Numerous other combinations, like EPPs for testing web services or a mobility solution that leverages the ClearPath ePortal for MCP EPP, are possible, as well.

A Big Step for AB Suite

The elements we’ve built into ClearPath Forward – including the high-speed interconnect, secure fabrics, expanded EPP size, and compatibility with ClearPath MCP Developer Studio, to name a few – all play an integral role in taking your AB Suite development, test, and Runtime environments to the next level.

For example, when you pair ClearPath Forward with MCP 17.0, you can dramatically accelerate the AB Suite Build process, cutting the time it needs to execute by as much as half. And by moving your AB Suite solution into the ClearPath Forward environment, you’ll gain tighter control over the entire software channel, so it’s easier to manage application availability SLAs.

But this is just the start. We designed ClearPath Forward with the express purpose of redefining what’s possible in a ClearPath system. And as we add more to the environment, your AB Suite applications will be in a prime position to reap the rewards.