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Oracle Joins IBM AIX Collaboration Center

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the on-the-way-to-one-big-corporation dept.

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."

13 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. Not necessarily a shift by gee_unix · · Score: 4, Insightful

    it also represents some shift in emphasis by IBM from Linux back to its mature Unix operating system

    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. Even Linux users should be heartened to hear that IBM won't abandon their customers lightly.

    Look how long they supported OS/2!

    --
    A monster ate my homework!
    1. Re:Not necessarily a shift by Amiga+Trombone · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Not necessarily a shift by jackb_guppy · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Not necessarily a shift by TallMatthew · · Score: 3, Informative
      Linux is great for commodity x86 servers, but on IBM's high-end hardware AIX stands head and shoulders above it.

      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.

  2. Unix isn't dead by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    SCO has been trying to argue that by promoting Linux, IBM has killed off its Unix business. They want billions of dollars in damages. This development shows that both IBM and Oracle don't think Unix is dead. SCO's business is dead because they have the bad habit of suing their customers not because Unix is going extinct.

    1. Re:Unix isn't dead by rubycodez · · Score: 2, Insightful

      SCO was dying long before that, no real innovation. Couldn't make it as a technology company, so they're trying their hand at being a litigation company.

  3. AIX Vs. Solaris by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:AIX Vs. Solaris by njcoder · · Score: 2, Interesting
      "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.

      --
      Open Source Java DAO Generator
  4. Re:AIX is legacy only by sedawkgrep · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Aside from GNU utils (which AIX does have packages for), what on earth does Linux have that's 'way better, in all respects' ?

    As a long-time sysadmin for AIX and Linux, I find this laughable at best. AIX has so many enterprise-level tools and resources that are so well-developed, that Linux, IMNSHO is still far FAR behind.

    So please, enlighten us.

    --
    Is that a salami in my pants or am I just happy to be me?
  5. Attention Slashdot editors: Edit is a verb. by Radak · · Score: 2, Informative

    And "it's" is not a possessive pronoun.

  6. Low Hanging Fruit by Greyfox · · Score: 2, Interesting
    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.

    --

    I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

  7. Re:AIX is legacy only by kpharmer · · Score: 2, Informative

    > 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.

  8. Unix03 compliance by thanasakis · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.