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."

Comments

Re:Not necessarily a shift

[Amiga Trombone]

This isn't necessarily a shift. Linux is perfect for many, many applications but there are a lot of applications and installations out there that are still relying on AIX.

I'd agree. Linux is great for commodity x86 servers, but on IBM's high-end hardware AIX stands head and shoulders above it. I don't really see a shift here - actually, I'd say AIX has never been away. If you look at the last few releases, you can see IBM has been putting a lot of effort into improving it. The hard work is starting to pay off in increased market share.

AIX Vs. Solaris

[Anonymous Coward]

AIX service and applications are more profitible for IBM than are Linux services. I would bet that shoring up AIX is in repsonse to Sun's greater emphasis on Solaris. Both are formidible for large enterprise applications, but Solaris is now open source and picking up steam. This will be interesting to watch as two giants duke it out.

Who says non-Linux UNIX OS's are dead? Far from it.

Re:AIX Vs. Solaris

[njcoder]

"They've got them, and as low as $5,575. Though I think they are primarily intended for unix graphics packages like Catia: http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/intellistation/power /"

I don't know what you uconsider low cost workstations, but something starting at 5,575 doesn't seem to qualify as low cost. If you want to run a real Unix on a supported platform Sun's workstations start out a lot cheaper and similarly loaded workstations are cheaper. http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process= SunStore&cmdViewProduct_CP&catid=48612 AMD workstations start out as little as 895 and UltraSparc based workstations go for as little as 1,395. They can run Solaris 10 as well as RedHat and Suse. Similarly, you can get Sparc and AMD based servers from Sun for under a grand. Being able to run multiple lpars may be cost effective if you want to run multiple lpars but if you want to have one affordable server for development.

Low Hanging Fruit

[Greyfox]

Want to make AIX (Or any of the other commercial unices) better instantly? Jettison all those crappy old AT&T utilities and replace them with their GNU counterparts. While functionality has been added to the commercial utilities only when necessary, the people working on the GNU variants have been adding useful features all along. The GNU variants are also more stable than their commercial counterparts.

Another big win would be to replace the generally crappy packaging systems with something like apt. A few companies have made a stab at implementing package systems that work around dependency hell, but I've never encountered one that works as well as apt does. And I'd sooner dig my eyeballs out of my head with toothpicks rather than work with SMIT ever again...

Those two steps alone would make commercial unices a lot nicer to deal with. While the other UNIX variants may be more mature than Linux in the kernel department, they are DECADES behind in the user interface arena. OSX being a noteworthy exception.

Unix03 compliance

[thanasakis]

Take a look at the unix03 register. Only Solaris 10 and AIX are Unix03 compliant. That's why it makes perfect sense for IBM to continue its commitement to AIX (and for Sun to Solaris of course).

Linux (I mean Linux in the broader sense, not just the kernel) should strive to achieve some sort of formal compatibility to a standard like that.