IBM AIX vs. openSUSE Leap

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

OpenSUSE Leap is well suited for just about any Linux task. Especially I like to use it as Docker base image for my software deployments, because it has a wide variety of software packages available already precompiled and packages are well maintained - vulnerable software versions are patched in reasonable time. OpenSUSE Leap is rpm based system, and it wouldn't install Debian or other systems packages. If your software is not an rpm package then OpenSUSE Leap would not be suitable for your system.

• 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.

• Maintenance of software packages using YAST
• Availability of patches when a vulnerability is discovered
• Distribution upgrades

• 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

• Commercial packages not always available
• Stable packages sometimes lag behind the latest releases

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

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

openSUSE Leap has wide variety of already precompiled software packages in default repositories. It even has some specific packages in official repositories that are not available in other Linux distribution repositories. It is also very stable and reliable distro - we can predict when new versions will be released and when we should make system upgrades.

• 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

• More effective maintenance means a smaller headcount needed for running the production servers.
• The easiness of deployment means more time we can spend on software development of company-specific applications.
• Great community support and overlap with other Linux systems mean that an answer to nearly any problem is usually one google query away.