IBM AIX vs. openSUSE Tumbleweed

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 Tumbleweed is best suited to developers, system administrators, and other power users. Beginning users looking for stability and less-frequent package updates will likely be served by alternatives such as openSUSE Leap.

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.

• uses hardware too wisely.
• easy to setup machines.
• easy to ssh the machines hosted.

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

• Sometimes after system update old software configuration does not work

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 Tumbleweed is a fast-moving and quick-updating Linux distribution. It aims to deliver the latest versions of software packages while being automatically tested before each release. openSUSE Leap has a slower release face and is more suited for users looking to use a certain vetted set of packages which only receive bug fixes.

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

• Easy to get into the cluster and track logs.
• Easy to configure.

Incentivized