IBM AIX, a robust and friendly Unix enterprise operating system
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use IBM AIX in own our organization and support many customers running AIX on our cloud environment with IBM POWER servers.
IBM AIX gives us a highly scalable, robust and secure operating environment for business critical software, like Oracle, DB2 and SAP.
The IBM AIX operating system is designed as an enterprise operating system and has excellent RAS features (for reliability, availability and stability). Many settings can be done on-the-fly without requiring a reboot, and Live Kernel Update is available for fixes/updates that would otherwise require a reboot.
IBM AIX is also very secure, requiring much less fixes for security vulnerabilities compared to other operating systems. And features like secure-by-default, role-based access control, file permission manager, trusted execution and secure boot enhance security. It also integrates well with tools like IBM PowerSC to tighten security even further.
AIX needs to run on IBM POWER hardware, which is in a class of its own as far as RAS and performance are concerned. If you look at TCO, the combination of AIX, POWER system(s) and an application often produce a better performing combination at a lower cost, compared to many alternatives.
Pros
- For an operating system based on Unix AIX is very user-friendly. In addition to the manual pages, it also includes SMIT (a system management interface tool) both graphically and text-based, that helps administrators execute complex commands. SMIT logs all AIX commands (and their output) to logfiles, so you can review (and duplicate yourself) what it executed 'under the covers'.
- AIX has high (or sometimes dynamic) limits on lots of settings. Of course you can tune a lot of variables that determine how the operating system acts, but the defaults have evolved over decades and are generally great. A lot of settings are by default based e.g. on the amount of memory and scale with the system.
- In combination with IBM POWER hardware and PowerVM (built in to the hardware of every modern POWER system) AIX can make full use of dynamic features like adding (and removing) additional processing capacity, memory, SAN-based disks etc. to an AIX virtual machine (LPAR) on the fly.
- AIX has excellent built-in security, where a secure-by-default installation skips installation of software components notorious for causing security issues, disables services that are normally considered unsafe (like plain ftp) etc. File permission manager allows you to select wanted degrees of security (based on profiles provided or obtained from other sources) to tighten security. Trusted Execution allows you to restrict execution only to programs that haven't been modified - the OS refuses to run (unauthorized) modified programs. Secure Boot makes sure the software used to start the system, including AIX itself is not tampered with.
Cons
- I would like Live Kernel Update not to be dependent on a connection to the HMC.
- I would like IBM to provide more "thirdp arty" software in installp format (AIX-native install packages) instead of relying on RPM packages to be installed with rpm, yum or dnf.
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM AIX is well suited for mission-critical applications, especially the ones that need to run on well-performing hardware and need less downtime. It is also perfect for applications that need a lot of CPU, because AIX scales well on the IBM POWER hardware, so adding additional CPU almost always generates higher performance/throughput.
IBM AIX runs unmodified from the smallest IBM POWER machine (S1022, with 12 Power10 cores) to the biggest machine (E1080, with 240 Power10 cores).
Because IBM POWER systems have very fast CPU’s, you typically need a lower number of CPU’s when compared to alternatives. This may bring a reduction in cost for software licensed per core.
Unfortunately, not all software vendors port their software to IBM AIX, so sometimes you may have to run Linux on POWER, or skip the POWER platform altogether. But many vendors happily support AIX and POWER.