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Leading the Pack

AIX’s 25-year history sets it apart from competitors

Time really does fly when you’re having fun. Having worked with UNIX since 1988 (starting with SCO UNIX 3.2.2), I've been through the fall spectrum of UNIX Operating Systems. The systems I’ve worked with include Solaris and Hewlett-Packard UniX (HP-UX) and through the years I have achieved certifications in all of the major UNIX operating systems. I actually didn’t start working with AIX until 1999–when I was tasked to deploy a new business system for one of the largest legal-publishing companies in the world. While I was its Director of IT, because of money constraints and the fact that I had the UNIX experience, I took on the added role as UNIX administrator. What made the experience more pleasurable was it included my first exposure to High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing (HACMP), which is now branded as PowerHA. There’s no other high-availability product on the midrange today that can boast the maturity and robustness of PowerHA. One major reason for this is its tight integration with AIX. What is it about AIX that sets it apart from the rest of the pack from the other UNIX systems?

IBM Hardware

IBM Power Systems are tightly integrated with IBM’s UNIX: AIX. They’ve always been and always will be. IBM’s strategy has always been consistent. While other companies’ strategies have been to make their product more open-source and giving it the capability to run on more platforms, IBM has focused on optimizing Power for AIX, and this strategy clearly has worked. As the Watson–the computer that just defeated two of the strongest Jeopardy champions in history–has shown us recently, Power Systems have shown to be the most powerful in the world. In fact, the new IBM Power 795 has been shown to deliver three to four times the performance per core and more than 4 times higher system scalability than either the 128-core HP Integrity SuperDome and the 256-core Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000. The Power 795 and the Power 595 outperform the HP Superdome and Sun M9000 in a variety of benchmarks; including 126,063 SAP users on SAP’s SD 2-Tier benchmark6. The POWER6, 64-core IBM Power 595 server outperforms the 128-core HP Integrity Superdome – more performance with one half of the cores. The 595 also has 90 percent of the performance of the 256-core Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 – 90 percent of the performance with one fourth of the cores. (See more benchmarks online.

A Roadmap

IBM consistently publishes a roadmap many years in advance as to the future plans for AIX. Why is this important? Enterprise companies that rely on their key systems need to plan appropriately for future releases and also to better understand upcoming innovations that might have relevance in their environment. See Figure 1 for today’s road map, which illustrates where it has come and where it sits today.

Marketshare

When AIX celebrated its 20th anniversary in January 2006, it appeared to have an extremely bright future in the UNIX space. IBM’s AIX had been the only UNIX that increased its market share through the years, and IBM continues to own the market space for UNIX servers. This slide illustrates the success that IBM has had over the past decade, through its myriad of innovations.

AIX continues to lead the pack in market share of the UNIX operating systems – particularly at the high end. How many companies do you know of that move from AIX to Solaris? Search for case studies and you won’t find any. On the other hand, there are hundreds of published case studies of customers that have moved to Power and AIX. Marketshare is important to customers, because companies don’t want to standardize on products that are failing.

Server consolidation is one of the most important infrastructure projects today. IBM’s Power Systems and AIX are built for the most demanding of server-consolidation projects. Together, they allow customers to scale up, not out, saving money on footprint, power and cooling, as well as staff required to maintain large, unruly server farms.

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