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Oracle Joins IBM AIX Collaboration Center
pgsqlDao writes "CRN is reporting that Oracle is joining IBM's AIX Collaboration Center. 'IBM announced the center Dec. 16 as a $200 million investment where it will centralize AIX development, customer relations and advanced features for independent software vendors. While the figure represents existing salaries and equipment drawn together under one roof, it also represents some shift in emphasis by IBM from Linux back to its mature Unix operating system.' In November Oracle announced that it has chosen Solaris 10 as it's preferred development and deployment platform for X64 computing."
Very much agreed.
With AIX it is one of 3 OS that IBM supports native on the iSeries lines; OS/400, AIX, Linux. With its pSeries line AIX and Linux are both supported. pSeries is a "daughter" or "sister" line of iSeries.
Both of the lines and have 1 or more OS running at the same time on the same box, each acting as it own machine and talking to the other OSs in the box on a 54G back plane.
Differently shows the power of Power5 and hardware design.
That's sort of true.
I worked not too long ago for a company with an 8xCPU, 12TB Oracle instance running on RedHat Linux 3.0 (32bit). It worked perfectly well, but we were bottlenecked on CPU and memory (needed to move to 64bit) and wanted to hook a SAN up to it (before that we ran it over NFS, which works believe it or not). We tried to find a combination of 64-bit Linux, Oracle and Veritas (to manage volumes on the SAN) to run on the high-end Linux hardware available but there just wasn't enough out there at that point.
We ended up moving the DB to AIX, at the strong urging of IBM, on whose server the bottlenecked Oracle instance had been running. They were far more motivated to sell us a RISC box than they were to try and find a Linux solution (the profit margin was substantially higher) and we knew that, but we couldn't find the combination we needed to move forward with Linux. IBM went to a lot of trouble to show us benchmarks that showed AIX was superior to Linux, which says a lot about their Linux strategy, namely it's all well and good until it steals market share from their high-margin products.
It's possible IBM shifted policy after they got burned on 64bit Itaniums. At that same job I was on, they had put one in, wanting to increase Oracle's addressable memory space, but the performance of the CPUs was so abysmal they ended up moving backwards to P4s and 32bit, which as I mentioned did the job until the application finally bottlenecked. At the time we purchased the AIX box from them, they didn't have any x86 boxes in their pipeline that would run 64bit Linux (they had a new xseries that would scale past eight of those 32bit CPUs with 64bit extensions I believe, but it wouldn't run 64bit Linux), so it's possible they've clipped the higher-end x86 boxes from their offerings altogether in order to keep AIX viable in this enterprise market.
What IBM does or does not do should always be taken with a grain of salt.
And "it's" is not a possessive pronoun.
Not only that, IBM has got contracts with very important people (think: national governments and security forces around the world) which obligate them to continue to support and develop AIX until 2020. Even if IBM believed that Linux was the only future of operating systems (and it doesn't; monocultures are never good), it cannot even think about winding up AIX for another 15 years.
> Solaris 10 kicks AIX butt in features and performance.
Do you know of any public benchmarks that would show this? I know that AIX 5.3 on Power5 is almost 50% faster than AIX 5.2...
And more to the point - IBM is much healthier than Sun, and much more likely to be around in 10 years.
> AIX is not free, Solaris 10 and Linux are free to users (maintenance is extra, unless you chose to get it
> via the LUGs or other sources)
That's not really accurate. You *can* get a free linux distribution, but quite often you'll find that applications require RedHat or Suse. And RHEL4 is more expensive than AIX.
> Linux is a very good choice for a Small/Medium Business environment and even for some desktops.
Sure, I'd actually recommend both. Want to run websevers or print servers? Linux works fine. Want to run critical app or database servers? AIX is a better fit. Obviously linux will be better on desktops or laptops.
> Right now Linux does not scale really well once you get past about 16 CPUs.
That seems to be a diminishing issue: the big driver of massive SMPs was Oracle, and they've headed towards a more distributed architecture. It certainly doesn't matter at all for db2 or informix - where they have for years supported more of a beowulf-like clustering approach.