Edit: Still good stuff.
Originally posted June 2013 by IBM Systems Magazine
The AIX* operating system continues to be a leader in the UNIX* marketplace. AIX celebrated 25 years in 2011, and users have every reason to expect that the operating system will continue to evolve and move forward for the next 25.
Businesses of all flavors in all industries have varied experiences with the operating system. Some have been running it for many years—or even from its inception. Others are new to the environment as IBM continues to migrate clients from other UNIX or Windows* platforms.
In most cases, people making the switch want an enterprise-class operating system running on enterprise-class hardware. They don’t want to answer their problems by rebooting the system. Businesses in all industries have critical workloads, and unexpected downtime is not an option—they need robust hardware that can let them know if problems are on the horizon.
Clients should think about their end game and what they’re trying to accomplish. You want a high-performing processor at the heart of your hardware platform.
They also want their hardware to call home to IBM if it has an issue. They want to call IBM support and get answers to all of their hardware and operating system questions. It’s not infrequent to hear stories of clients that didn’t even know they had a problem, but IBM support called to let them know they’d be stopping by to replace a failing power supply and no downtime would be required.
Clients deciding what criteria they’ll use when selecting servers and operating systems shouldn’t base their decision strictly on price, where the acquisition price point wins no matter what the total cost of ownership might be. They should also think about their end game and what they’re trying to accomplish. You want a high-performing processor at the heart of your hardware platform. You want what IBM calls RAS—reliability, availability and serviceability. You should also look for the satisfaction of the platform’s end users along with those who maintain the servers.
Top 10
For these 10 reasons, AIX should still be going strong for many years to come:
1 It’s easy to use. AIX clients can use command-line tools such as smitty, which is menu-driven and can help find the tasks you’re seeking without memorizing the commands and flags on the command line. The tool keeps a history of the commands run and sends the output from those commands to a log file. It can also display the actual command it ran “under the covers.” You can go into smitty, select your options, hit F6 and it will display which command will run. This also lets you automate tasks with a script. If you prefer a GUI, you can run tools such as IBM Systems Director, which can help manage an entire fleet of servers and the virtual machines running on them.
2 It’s easy to learn more about the operating system and the hardware. A great deal of information is available in the IBM Redbooks* publications, freely available documents that cover hardware and software products in great detail. Additionally, many people are writing blogs, publishing articles, recording videos and sharing knowledge with one another. In a short amount of time, you can get up to speed with the various ways to use the system. Even if you’re a longtime user, you can learn more by reading the ample and ever-increasing documentation.
3 It’s easy to get support when you need it. You can call IBM and ask how-to questions, or if you run into issues, you can easily speak to experts that can help. They take snapshots, or “snaps,” of your system to help analyze it, and they have secure shared-screen sessions available to help with troubleshooting, if necessary. Since IBM develops the processor, assembles the machine and creates the operating system, it owns the stack; therefore, the company deeply understands the system your business is running.
4 Because IBM owns the entire stack, it creates the hardware and the firmware. And since it employs the developers, it can get field questions answered by the people who actually wrote the code. You can feel confident knowing that the experts who built the hardware also built the virtualization hypervisor that runs on top of it, enabling virtualization with little overhead.
5 The ecosystem is full of friendly people willing to help you learn. Many users are willing to share their expertise, and if you want to learn more, the sources are available. Training classes and conferences offer opportunities to learn directly from experts. User groups and virtual user groups let users network and learn from one another.
6 AIX just runs. Although it’s obviously recommended that you continue to update the firmware on your server and install fixes and patches to your operating system, if you were to neglect it and let it sit in a corner of your machine room, it would happily hum along with little intervention. Over the years, you’ll find many examples of clients who followed the adage “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it,” and they just let their systems run. Ask other AIX shops how often their production LPARs go down due to the operating system or the Power Systems* hardware. The answer is likely close to never.
7 As good as the platform is, it keeps getting better. IBM consistently delivers more functionality via faster hardware and more functionality from the operating system.
8 IBM provides innovations not found elsewhere in the enterprise UNIX space. Live partition mobility, or moving a running workload with no outages from one frame to another, doesn’t happen on other platforms. Active Memory Expansion allows for compressed memory, which drives higher utilization of the memory you purchased. Active Memory Sharing allows workloads to shift memory consumption between LPARs as demands for that memory shift over time. Workload partitions (WPARs) let you run multiple workloads on a single LPAR. Simultaneous multithreading allows for more work to be performed per processor core. All of these innovations keep IBM leading other vendors by a wide margin.
9 IBM has a clear roadmap. The company has predictable cycles in releasing new processors, hardware and versions. It has consistently delivered on its technology, where others have stumbled along the way.
10 IBM makes a huge investment in R&D and chip technology. This investment shows in the products that IBM sells. The company also trickles down innovations from other product lines, for example, using mainframe technologies in its midrange servers. IBM has been learning lessons in the computing field for more than 100 years, and that knowledge gets implemented in the hardware it sells. As IBM continues to innovate and invest in the product line, clients will continue to benefit by running an enterprise-class operating system for many years to come.