Likelihood to Recommend 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 I guess to give it more context, my first job in the Linux ecosystem was in web hosting. And that was basically a Cintas shop and it was all run extremely lean and very bootstrappy do it on your own. You don't get any support. And for that environment, it was kind of just the way it is. It's very cutthroat. You have to move super fast. Once I moved over to the corporate side, every company I've worked with has been on rail. And the thing that really kind of makes it the best choice compared to using another operating system, another flavor of Linux and just kind of figuring out your own is the amount of support that Red Hat gives rail as far as extra tools like Satellite Insights and what's coming up now with Ansible and especially Ansible. Lightspeed, but also SLAs and stuff like that. Because yeah, I mean it was good learning in that first environment because there were no tickets, there was no support. It was figured out. But nowadays it's just nice to have an SLA agreement. I can just open a ticket. I say that that's something that does really well, but I also want to see it expanded, just more like vendor support at an enterprise level. I'm not sure yet what that would mean. I just have that every time we come up for renewal, I look at the price tag and it's like, what else can we do here? I like what Red Hat is doing just more.
Read full review Pros 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 For us, it's going to be the deployment and the patching. It does a good job because you can put your no reboot tags and things like that because working with production systems and so we don't want them just rebooting suddenly because they were patched in the Linux world. So the non-reboot tags and the operating system deployment is the biggest thing we find that saves time and that's the biggest thing that we like. The tools. The tools that save time. Read full review Cons 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 From an automation perspective. RHEL is really moving forward, but some of their ideas are still not ideas, but their implementations of it still feel half-baked, like the functionality's there, but it's not the kind of functionality that to me makes it a full-on solution with OpenShift in particular as we're bringing this in and we're getting more into containers because it's more important for the banking industry and other industries. Justice General, well you can do this by script and we don't have an interface for this and sort of things sort of like that. I'm trying to think if there's anything else that RHEL does that bothers me as a general rule. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We find RHEL to be a superior OS with stable operations and long life. It is also easier to use and fix then most other OS's.
Read full review Usability RHEL has most of the features that are required by an ERP solution. If you need any additional packages, RHEL has a great repository and a very easy package installation/upgrade process.
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 Red Hat support has really come a long way in the last 10 years, The general support is great, and the specialized product support teams are extremely knowledgeable about their specific products. Response time is good and you never need to escalate.
Read full review Implementation Rating Don't be afraid of it, its easy to install and configure for the tasks needed.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 The biggest thing about RHEL that makes it stand out for enterprise users is the support that we get from the vendor. Whereas with the other ones, you're basically left on your own. There's no official repo, there's no satellite for patching. You're very left on your own with the community.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 Auditors are happy that we use an enterprise class distribution Patch process is easy and fairly predictable Information Security is fully satisfied with the speed of the fixing the errata and general state of the security patches, including the backporting process Read full review ScreenShots