IBM AIX vs. Microsoft Windows

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

It is well suited in a work environment, being that an organization can set up their system to be specifically work related and only certain users can get access is really helpful. I also like that multiple users can log in on the same device and keep each account seperate without interfering with the other.

• 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.

• Smooth operating system
• Intuitive user interface
• Easy integration of other Microsoft products
• System encryption
• Very secure

• 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

• confusing at first when shut down is under start menu
• task bar on 2 displays sometimes won't hide automatically even though set that way
• not so intuitive to set up 2 displays

Incentivized

Works fine until it stops working, then hard to troubleshoot and fix!

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

support remains spotty, researching online articles are a pain

Incentivized

MDT helped deploy OS to users machines via PXE boot.

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

Because of its compatibility with third-party software requirements.

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

• Increased productivity
• Intuitive interface
• Quick operation
• Minimal interruption from system processes