Did the Top 10 Predictions on AIX come true?
I stumbled across a 2013 version of IBM Systems Magazine from 2013 entitled ‘Top 10 Reasons AIX Will Endure’
Intrigued to find out what these predictions on the future were I opened the article and the reasons could roughly be grouped as follows:
- Ease of Use
- Support
- IBM and its continued investment and roadmap
AIX Ease of Use
The article discusses command line tools and even a GUI for those daring to prefer such an interface. However, while experienced administrators are becoming harder to find the explosion of Linux into the enterprise space has maintained its ease of use. It’s not a giant leap for Linux specialists to administer AIX and IBM’s continued open systems approach has enabled hypervisors to operate across AIX and Linux environments.
AIX Support
IBM is still there for those willing to pay the support premium but many local service providers can provide excellent cloud and hosting services with Sysadmin and DB admin tasks on Oracle and even Progress databases. Local service providers are also more likely to be willing to tailor service levels to your needs and offer a more consistent relationship.
Continued Investment
New releases with real functionality have continued to be deployed as well as significant advances in the underlying Power platform. We have seen Power8 and AIX 7.2 with several Technology Levels since 2013 and will soon see Power9 technology. This has enabled AIX/Power to continuously evolve into an ideal platform for big data and analytics as well as HPC and high availability environments. Specialist local service providers can enable this in a cloud model to enable clients to reap the benefits of these enhancements. A recent survey suggested that 60% of current users planned to maintain or increase their footprint. Local Unix cloud service providers will also create hybrid environments for you and connect core AIX applications to applications deployed in Public Clouds such as AWS and Azure.
So predictions can come true (though maybe not in the way anticipated in 2013). To see how L3C can help with your Unix environments contact jerry@l3c.cloud
