Unisys is partnering with Intel to peddle a secure computing platform designed to handle the most demanding requirements of mission-critical cloud and big data workloads. The company said that the move will offering Unix clients a cost-effective path off legacy RISC-based platforms onto an Intel-based environment.

The new platform, to be released later in 2013, will build on the security Unisys delivers in mission-critical computing. It will combine Unisys' advanced secure partitioning (s-Par) technology with Xeon processors and aims to provide a flexible and powerful environment.

Unisys said that the platform will be the first architecture based on Intel Xeon processors to bring enterprise-level security, availability, scalability. It will allow companies to use the cloud and host Linux, Windows and migrated Unix application workloads on the same platform.

The new platform will allow for big data to be used in real-world applications. It can run open-source Hadoop queries in a single secure partition, adding virtual machines when they are needed.