What’s the future for AIX?
Towards the back end of last year there was debate in the Unix communities around the future of several Unix operating systems. Unsettling news had been released by Oracle regarding its Solaris team https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/04/oracle_layoffs_solaris_sparc_teams/ and many have long thought HP’s UX roadmap was uninspired at best. Naturally attention turned to IBM’s AIX.
A recent article (albeit supported with comments mainly from IBMers) claimed a bold future but what does this future entail?
Reasonable estimates suggest there are around 250,000 AIX systems in operation across the world today. While the market conveniently classes them as legacy systems the majority of these are running core business critical applications – not something that is side-lined and waiting to be migrated to another OS but something that is at the heart of business operations. I tend to think of these applications as a company’s heart and heritage. We rarely come across clients that are looking to migrate off AIX, in fact they are looking to the future and how their AIX applications play in that future, especially in a cloud and AI context.
AIX has evolved over the years and continues to evolve to take advantage of the continued evolution of the underlying IBM Power technology. This is one of the main features that has ensured a real future and why the 250,000 organisations have not abandoned it but are now looking at the role it plays in their cloud and AI strategies.
As a cloud service provider our clients are not looking for a ‘lift and shift’ co-location space as some retirement home for their AIX environments but rather how can they move their heritage applications to the latest Power technology and integrate into a hybrid cloud world with their public cloud based applications. Such a migration allows them to take advantage of the latest Power technology, not just for opportunities to integrate Linux and AIX applications on the same platform or experiment with AI analytics on the same platform but also move to a fully supported environment improving their reliability and availability SLAs and certainly enhancing their DR RTO/RPOs.
Our established cloud roadmap eases the migration to a more modern environment for AIX users, even for the most business critical applications with the strictest SLAs and enables access to the latest PowerAI environments and public cloud integration.
So we (along with 250,000 other non-IBMers) see AIX as having a strong future and further evolving to being at the heart of a cloud strategy.
For more information and ideas on AIX, cloud and PowerAI contact us at office@l3c.cloud.
