OK, so why is AIX so popular?
.........
No, I am not referring to the French
city-commune, located about 30 km north of Marseille, of the same name – but IBM’s Unix Operating
System (OS) offering.
As a Unix professional, I sometimes get asked:
“…how do I select the right platform…”
While there is no fixed answer, usually, when you
dig deeper, the picture becomes clearer. More often than not, the answer is
AIX.
A major factor of its success, is in no small
part down to how extremely well AIX is intertwined with IBM's virtualisation
technology; PowerVM.
Companies nowadays make it a priority to ensure
they are able to maximise their return on investment in IT – and rightly so. The
association between AIX and PowerVM allows businesses to do just that by
reducing their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
Lower TCO is achieved by the consolidation of
many workloads onto a lesser number of physical systems, slashing overall
maintenance costs of hardware, data centre footprint, power and cooling costs,
database license fees (through reduced amount of CPU cores), physical cabling
and human capital outlays. Overall performance is increased and at the same
time, it can facilitate standardisation.
Whilst we have seen a big growth spurt in Linux –
which is fine by IBM
as it is supported on POWER systems – AIX is still the more mature OS. It has
better vendor support and a tightly integrated hardware set. The thing that sets
AIX apart is that it is the only Unix OS that has fully harnessed decades of IBM technology innovation
designed to provide the highest level of performance and reliability. The
hardware is optimised and heavily integrated with the OS. It also helps that IBM Power Systems are easily
the most powerful of midrange Unix servers ... AIX has grown up side by side
with PowerVM and POWER hardware.
A Quick Look at AIX 7
AIX’s latest guise boasts many great
features:-
- It can run applications that operated on AIX 5L and earlier. In other words, it is binary compatible to many previous versions.
- It has built upon its previous scalability to partitions with 256 processor cores and 1024, handling the largest of workloads.
- Along with new security features and manageability improvements, Terabyte Segment Support is automatically enabled, meaning enhanced memory management.
- Virtualisation enhancements in the OS allow for a more simplified consolidation of older AIX environments by allowing the backup of an existing LPAR running AIX 5.3, and restoring it into an a AIX 7 Workload Partition.
- A really interesting feature is the ‘Cluster Aware AIX’ aspect, bringing elements of clustering technology into base OS. Vendors have long acknowledged the importance of clustering and this move underlines it. Cluster Aware AIX simplifies the configuration and management of high availability clusters, which is great news for us Systems Administrators.
For the enterprise company running
mission-critical applications, nothing is more important than having an OS that
is robust and reliable, along with a top, vendor supported virtualisation
platform. Evolving business requirements dictate that infrastructures need to be
flexible and are capable of adjusting accordingly.
It is for these reasons that more and more
organisations are choosing AIX.
Furthermore, unlike other Unix hardware vendors,
IBM provides a clear
road map for AIX.
AIX continues to grow market share…. The future
of AIX is strong!
If you require any further information regarding
IBM Unix Operating System offering please do not hesitate to contact your
Celerity Representative or email
info@celerity-uk.com
Chris Lang - Technical Consultant - Celerity Limited
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