AIX > Trends > AIX

Why AIX Is the Right Choice for Your Business

As a managing consultant of an IBM business partner specializing in IBM Power systems—I’m often asked how to choose the right platform. While there’s no cut-and-dried answer, usually, when you drill down more into the details, the picture becomes clearer. More often than not, the answer comes down to IBM’s AIX.

So how does AIX continue to be relevant—more than 20 years after a Byte magazine article proclaimed Unix was dead? Why does IBM continue to lead in overall Unix market share? And why is AIX right for your application and business?

Server Consolidation

Arguably the most important project for infrastructure teams today is server consolidation. When properly implemented, it can help increase manageability, availability, scalability and performance, all while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO). By using virtualization as its means, server consolidation allows businesses to reduce their TCO, by cutting the overall maintenance costs of hardware, data-center footprint, power and cooling costs, database license fees (through reduced amount of CPU cores) and human capital. At the same time, if done properly, it can let you standardize on platforms—hardware, operating systems, or both.

For example, IBM Power servers can run AIX and, Linux on the same hardware platform. Power servers, along with AIX and IBM’s midrange virtualization engine, PowerVM, allow you to scale up (within your physical box), rather than out, which provides for much of these savings. From an enterprise standpoint, IBM offers the Power 795, a beast that boasts a 64-bit POWER7 8-core processor technology in up to 256-core configurations with performance far surpassing the competition.

Back Story

First introduced in 1986, AIX was ported to the RS/6000 platform in 1989. In 2001, IBM unveiled AIX 5L, which coincided with the release of POWER4 servers and provided for the logical partitioning of servers. IBM created its first midrange Hypervisor around this combination. More than any other factor, this was the breakthrough that IBM needed to challenge for UNIX supremacy. In a few short years, IBM would dominate the market.

AIX 5.3, first introduced in 2004, provided many new features including, security, virtualization, stronger reliability (RAS features), systems management, and administration. Some of its virtualization features included: micro-partitioning, virtual I/O servers (VIOs), and symmetric multithreading (SMT). IBM has since re-branded its virtualization product to PowerVM and some recent innovations include live application mobility (allowing one to fail over working partitions without downtime), Active Memory Sharing and multiple shared processor pools. No other flavor of Unix boasts these virtualization characteristics, nor can they match IBM’s 40-year history of virtualization.

With the introduction of AIX 6.1 in 2007, some of its major innovations include workload partitioning (WPARs), similar to Solaris zones/containers, and live application mobility, which lets you move these partitions without application down time. AIX was the first operating system to introduce the journaling file system (JFS), an advanced filesystem that enabled fast boot times by avoiding the need to perform file-system checking (fsck) for disks on reboot.

AIX Today

Now at version 7, AIX’s latest innovation is being cluster-aware. Vendors have long acknowledged the importance of clustering and are starting to incorporate elements of it into their OSs. This new technology builds clustering technologies in the AIX base operating system, which provides commands and programming APIs to create a cluster from a group of AIX instances and provides kernel-based heartbeat, monitoring and event infrastructure. While this new functionality is primarily intended to provide a reliable, infrastructure for add-on products, such as PowerHA and PowerVM—as opposed to direct high-availability—clients can use the Cluster Aware AIX functionality to facilitate management of these environments.

IBM’s AIX continues its lead on overall Unix market share. According to a Gartner study in 2010, within the Unix OS market, IBM’s AIX had high single-digit-growth, but Unix generally experienced modest or negative growth. Among the three OSs owned by IBM, AIX experienced the highest growth at 9.2 percent, largely due to the popularity of Power Systems. In Q2 2011, while other hardware vendors showed declining sales, IBM Power Systems grew 12 percent, driven mostly by growth in enterprise systems.

AIX runs only on IBM Power Systems, which is a plus because the hardware is optimized and heavily integrated with the OS. It also helps that IBM Power systems are easily the most powerful of midrange Unix servers. Furthermore, unlike other Unix hardware vendors, IBM provides a clear road map for AIX and Power. AIX is the only Unix that continues to grow market share, partly because of the capabilities of the Power hardware that continues to lead the field in reliably, availability and scalability (RAS).

Here to Stay

I’m often asked AIX’s staying power, despite a strong growth spurt from Linux. While the future, in many ways, may be moving toward Linux (which is fine by IBM, as it also fully supports Linux on its Power servers), Unix is still the more mature OS. It has better vendor support and tightly integrated hardware. The virtualization offering available with AIX—PowerVM is also intertwined with AIX and the hardware. For the enterprise company running mission-critical applications, nothing is more important than having an OS and hardware that just doesn’t go down, along with a vendor supported virtualization platform—which is what you expect from IBM.

The future of AIX is still strong and will only get stronger. With respect to Bytes’ infamous front-page story, Unix is not going away anytime soon, and AIX should continue to lead the way.

Tweet