CentOS Linux vs. IBM AIX

In any role where you need raw server power, CentOS Linux is extremely well suited. It is extremely stable, and in my experience, probably the most stable of the Linux distros available. It has a very wide base of support from 3rd party sources for additional functionality that do not come already in the CentOS Linux distribution itself. It is not as appropriate for situations that are customer facing or end user facing. For those, I recommend Ubuntu Linux. But for everything server & compute related, I recommend CentOS Linux.

Incentivized

IBM AIX is a very powerful and extremely stable operating environment. It is well suited for applications that are business critical and cannot tolerate outages. It is best used to address large enterprise level application needs where stability and scalability are of paramount importance. IBM AIX is less useful for small enterprises.

Incentivized

• First of all, CentOS is one of the most secure and stable OSes straits from the box.
• High performance on the average hardware.
• In most of my scenarios—easy and quick deployment.
• Huge KB community that helps to build and support different services on CentOS.
• Versions lifecycle.

Incentivized

• The newer version of IBM AIX allows to apply new patches without system restart
• IBM AIX was the first operating system to have a journaling file system and have enhanced software features.
• IBM AIX will have good vendor support 24/7 and will ensure reliability to the customers and more performance when compared to it peers.

• CentOS is not a great desktop platform. Although some would disagree with that statement, I think that CentOS is better suited to life as a server.
• Since CentOS is community-supported some software vendors will not officially support it because it isn't Red Hat.

Incentivized

• A lot of the built-in commands have not been updated in years. If you're used to some fancy CLI options in Linux, you may be out of luck with AIX.
• Out of the box, you cannot run open-source Linux utilities on AIX. There is a toolbox you can install, however, it's not the same versions as you would get in different Linux flavors.
• Tab completion for files and Up arrow to re-run previous commands don't work out of the box without running a Korn shell. A small annoyance, but one that catches me every time!

Incentivized

Again, written documentation is excellent, even on the older versions. The support community is the best. It is comprehensive and I would say that it global because it transcends national boundaries. Also, you find all types of people using CentOS to do all sorts of things so you are bound to find someone to talk to if there are problems.

Incentivized

There is lots of documentation out there for AIX. On the times I've had to address a hardware issue, IBM's support has been great.

Incentivized

CentOS is based on RHEL, so it really came down to the costs when making the selection between our options. RHEL offered more support and features, but nothing that we specifically needed. CentOS is fully customizable, something Windows Server was also lacking in many ways. The stability and speed was unmatched in comparison to Windows, and we were not utilizing any Windows-specific software to require us to use the Microsoft alternative. My years of experience have also made it a breeze to set up and configure new CentOS instances, leading me to stay where I'm comfortable.

Incentivized

Standard Linux distributions which are used more as commodity servers do not offer the ease of scale and growth that we see with our Aix implementations. IBM owning the HW and SW portions of the stack allows for tighter integrations and better performance windows.

Incentivized

• CentOS's support of RPM packages makes it very easy to replicate RHEL servers for development or testing in cheap / free environments
• CentOS's minimalistic desktop environment requires additional tweaking / packages if you want to have a usable desktop environment with the niceties of other modern distributions. As a result, if developers want to use CentOS, they'll need to spend more time customizing it than other distros.
• CentOS's easy customization from the command line lends itself well to our virtualization infrastructure where setup can be easily scripted to modify CentOS's configuration files.

Incentivized

• IBM AIX on Power hardware has been the backbone of our most critical applications.
• The versatility of IBM AIX virtualization has been extremely useful, scalable, and provided configuration with redundant dual VIO servers.
• IBM AIX is not Linux so special skill sets are needed to actually manage the systems. Finding qualified engineers can often be a challenge

Incentivized