Likelihood to Recommend FreeBSD is an excellent choice to continue using older hardware and have it perform, it is a great choice for a UNIX based development environment. Although I haven't used it as a server, it is most suited for this - it would make an excellent, secure and robust server for and I would love to start using it for this as well.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Performs really well, even on older hardware Secure Robust Package manager (pkg) is excellent Large collection of ported software from Linux Documentation is excellent (FreeBSD Handbook) Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Installation can be tricky for first timers You need to be comfortable using a command line terminal most of the time Read full review 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! Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered FreeBSD was the only operating system out of many I tried to install easily on older hardware and to run in a very performant way. For example, I had a lot of trouble trying to get Ubuntu to install on older hardware and when it did, it was too slow to use. FreeBSD installed quite easily and even after installing a desktop such as XFCE - it still run surprisingly fast. I was very impressed with it's performance, which it seems is a goal of the FreeBSD project.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment As FreeBSD is free - the ROI is at least the cost of some commercial Linux or Windows based OS (which can be very expensive) Allowed the re-use of older hardware that would have otherwise been disposed No cost development environment Opportunity for a no cost server setup also Read full review 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 Read full review ScreenShots