IBM Guide Shows a Lengthy Road Ahead for AIX

Edit: It is good to know AIX will be around for years to come

Originally posted September 3, 2019 on AIXchange

IBM’s recently published guide lays out the company’s long-term commitment to AIX.

IBM recently published what it calls “an executive guide to the strategy and roadmap for the AIX operating system for IBM Power Systems.”

Don’t let the dry title fool you. This document has some good information about IBM’s long-term commitment to AIX. Since registration is required to access this 15-page PDF, I thought I would give you a taste.

This is from the executive letter:

“AIX has been the foundation of mission-critical workloads for a large and dedicated client community for more than thirty years. AIX has evolved to help drive cloud and enterprise AI initiatives for thousands of enterprise businesses and organizations around the world. And now, the team behind AIX have developed a forward-looking strategy and roadmap.”

This is from the introduction:

“As IBM Power Systems expands its portfolio to deliver value-driven offerings for the emerging Enterprise AI workload market, we remain committed to delivering a roadmap of innovation for both Power Systems hardware and AIX. The strategy focuses on supporting workload growth for the POWER architecture and solidifies an investment stream and market relevance for the AIX platform. Power Systems with AIX is the foundation for many core business applications and database environments.

AIX is deployed across a variety of industries such as finance, manufacturing, retail, telecommunications, healthcare, travel and government, along with many others. Today, it’s no secret businesses are experiencing growth as it relates to data. Fortunately, AIX is and will continue to be built to meet such growing demands for its community.”

The executive guide mentions hybrid multi-cloud, public cloud, PowerVM and PowerVC and more. A chart notes that most top companies—”most” as in 80-90 percent—run their businesses on IBM Power Systems, and they experience the lowest percentage of unplanned server downtime.

And as indicated in that long title, there is an AIX roadmap. It goes into the next decade… and the one after that. As of now, the plan for AIX extends to 2030.

Check out the guide’s closing statement:

“With thirty years of release engineering practices, AIX has a proven model for delivering new hardware support and software innovation through TLs. This approachminimizes disruption for AIX clients and ISVs by enabling them to easily adopt new capabilities because we are able to introduce all-new features via TLs. Experience has shown that new major AIX releases require additional qualification activities by clients and create a dependency on ISV certification and support statements before clients can adopt the new releases. TL’s minimize client disruption and the possible need for ISV’s to recompile, re-test and re-certify their software.

As IBM enhances AIX and plans updates, the following factors are considered. AIX has a very strong commitment to binary compatibility for APIs and command-line outputs across TL releases. Even across AIX major releases where compatibility impacts may be considered, this compatibility is an important goal. Binary compatibility changes are very carefully reviewed with new major releases. If new technology innovation in AIX were to challenge binary compatibility in a significant manner, a new major AIX release would be considered.”

AIX definitely isn’t going away. Take a moment to register and read the entire guide for yourself.