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 If somebody whishes to be an IT professional, learning the basics of Linux is amust. Ubuntu [Linux] is one of the most beginner-friendly, widely supported, easy-to-use-relative-to-the-fact-that-its-still-linux OS on the market. As somebody who learned the basics of UNIX/LINUX on Ubuntu, it was a very good experience. It is customizable, has a lot of improvements over the years, and live up to be a viable alternative to any modern OS in 2021 as well.
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 PACKAGE MANAGEMENT. You can update everything - OS installed software, you name it with either a few clicks in a GUI or a single command. No bloatware. No need for antivirus software. Certainly the price is right. My 83 year old grandmother has been using it - and because of this I rarely need to provide tech support. But I still visit my grandmother. You can choose from a variety of user interfaces or rock it in the terminal. Generally speaking, Ubuntu is as polished an OS as any you might pay for. 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 The repository system could be a little better, as some of the software needed is not easily available there. Ubuntu sometimes does not play nicely or easily with some modern firmwares. Some people report slow responses with newer versions of Ubuntu, although we have not experienced any. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Experience with other Distributions.
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 We did not use the managed commercial support, but instead relied on community forums and official documentation. Ubuntu is very well documented across both instructional documentation from the developers themselves as well as informal support forums [ServerFault, YCombinator, Reddit]. It's easy enough to find an answer to any question you may have
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 Windows 10 : Expensive, with more security problems, more difficult to keep updated and less variety of free / open source applications. Its use encourages bad information security practices. OpenSuse Linux : A different distribution at source (Suse Linux), use of rpm packages (with fewer repositories and incompatible with Ubuntu Linux dpkg packages), and whose main objective is to be a "testing ground" for its paid version / professional, SUSE enterprise Linux.
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 Systems administration with Ubuntu is easy with little deep knowledge about it. Docs and community publications are great resources for any task you need to perform on any Ubuntu server and the organization can save several salaries of specialized sys admins in favor of more active roles. Having been an Ubuntu user for many years personally, setting up new Ubuntu servers on my organization came with zero cost for me. I just deployed one instance from my hosting/cloud provider and started working right after it was running, no need to ask support or hire new staff for these tasks. Replacing paid options with Ubuntu have also saved thousands of dollars on Windows Server licenses. I've migrated Windows/SQL Server based systems to Ubuntu/MySQL/PostgreSQL several times during my career and saved about USD 5000/year in licenses to many of them. Read full review ScreenShots