IBM AIX vs. Oracle Solaris

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

Oracle Solaris is great due to the fact that it actually is meant for high-end servers. Supports a wide range of hardware. The Stability of the solution is great. The documentation does not support some solutions, and there are no other options. Most of the product is still command-line, despite the fact that they've got a graphical user interface in some areas. For some reason, core administration is still done via command-line.

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.

• Live update for patching in conjunction with the package management functions. This ability to rollback is very convenient.
• dTrace
• Built in compliance testing.

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

• Takes time to learn.
• Integration into Microsoft's Active Directory.

You need to take the time to learn it. It is a massive product.

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

The support teams are well trained and responsive. Patches are rolled out regularly and are easy to deploy and backout.

Stress testing and timing is key. You need test systems that mirror the live environments. User testing must be reflected in peak loads.

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

Oracle Solaris is Scalable, have a good patching capability and secure by default. You want to have something that's up and running and stable, something that's not going to crash. But if we do have an issue, we can get somebody for technical support who can help us work through the problems.

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

• It just runs like a top, this mean TCO is low
• We've not had issues with Solaris running on Sparc.
• Reliability is above reproach.

Incentivized