Edit: F50 servers? B80? 6M1? Now THAT is a long time ago.. I love that I am advocating for running AIX 6.1 on POWER6 hardware too.
Originally posted October 8, 2007 on AIXchange
I recently did some services work at a few customer sites. One customer was running an F50 with an unsupported version of AIX. Another was running a B80 and a 6M1 with AIX 5.1. In the first scenario, we needed to make some minor adjustments to the F50, and in the second case, we needed to upgrade the operating system. In both cases, upgrading to newer hardware came up in conversation. The virtues of virtualization and the benefits of the faster processing power and the reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) discussions all took place. Ultimately though, for their particular environments and workloads, their current solutions were working just fine.
As System p professionals, we continually keep up to date with new hardware, new features, and new offerings from IBM. It’s very easy to think that everyone should run POWER6 processors and AIX 6 with VIO, and we need to keep in mind that the technology and the speeds and the feeds are good things. But the bottom line is that customers have business problems that they’re trying to solve, and computing resources are tools to help them do that. If their older hardware does the job, they may see no compelling reason to change their environments–even if their current machine isn’t as fast or responsive, and even if their jobs might run in half the time on newer hardware.
For whatever reason–budgetary, strategic or something else–they’ve chosen not to make the move at this time. Some customers I talk to make the analogy of driving a 1992 model car that still gets them to their destination adequately. As much as they’d like to modernize, they feel it doesn’t make sense to do so at this time.
In the meantime, we’ll continue to educate them, so that when they are ready to make that move, they’ll know all of the features and benefits that they can look forward to.