Qantas Ditches Linux for AIX

An anonymous reader writes "Australia's No. 1 airline Qantas will shift their underlying platform running its internal finance systems from Linux to IBM's AIX next month as part of a wide-ranging technology transformation project. 'We're moving from a Linux platform to an IBM AIX environment — we did that to address some stability issues we were having', said Suzanne Young, Qantas group general manager for finance improvement and segmentation. The decision was made last year, as part of the planning for the rollout."

Comments

well

[mastershake_phd]

If there system was unstable it was probably their system design and not the OS.

Re:well

[Iron Condor]

If there system was unstable it was probably their system design and not the OS.

Exactly - and that's why it makes sense for them to switch to something like AIX that actually has a "system design". Which Linux doesn't. Linux is just an OS. Any one PC may or may not work with Linux. And may or may not stop working tomorrow for any of a thousand reasons.

When an hour of downtime costs you real money, it suddenly becomes a worthwhile thing to have someone who's contractually obliged to fix your system when it breaks. Posting a bug report at freshmeat doesn't quite cut it when you have planes grounded...

Re:well

[Per Abrahamsen]

> When an hour of downtime costs you real money, it suddenly becomes a worthwhile thing to have
> someone who's contractually obliged to fix your system when it breaks.

Many vendors, including IBM, would be happy to sell you such a contract for a Linux based system. In fact, I'd be very surprised if Qantas didn't already had such a contract for their Linux based system.

Presumably the new contract is cheaper, at least initially.

Re:well

[misleb]

Posting a bug report at freshmeat doesn't quite cut it when you have planes grounded...

Show your ignorance much?

AFAIK, IBM fully supports running Linux on their hardware. I'm sure whatever contract Quantas has with IBM covers Linux so they don't have to be posting bug reports on "Freshmeat" (still can't believe you said that) when the system goes down. That said, even Linux support from IBM may not as good as running AIX which (presumably) wouldn't have had the given problems in the first place.

-matthew

Re:well

[hdparm]

Oh shut up. Do you really think Qantas didn't have vendor supported Linux?

My take on this is one of the following:

- Linux was already supported by IBM and they figured a way of making more money (licenses + hardware)
- Someone at Quantas (perhaps lady from the article) has strong ties with someone at IBM and will earn a nice cut
- They can't fix their application / database, so they figured they'll blame it on Linux and by some time

Linux not stable? Give me a break.

Re:obsolete?

[AlexMax2742]

'We're moving from a Linux platform to an IBM AIX environment we did that to address some stability issues we were having'

That's why it's a good idea for them. Sounds to me like they're having genuine problems, if they moved to Windows Server 2003 complete with a crowing from Microsoft Headquarters, that might be something to worry about, but I doubt IBM has anything to gain from them moving from Linux to AIX, both of which they have a substantial amount of investment in.

And no, AIX is not dead, not any more than BSD is anyway.

Bad system management?

[VincenzoRomano]

The declaration by Quanta's officers sounds quite strange.
Instability can be brought up by inconsistent system management, like using different software version (either library, applications or operating systems, it doesn't matter).
If they plan to solve those issues with AIX (or any other operating system, even Windows) with no system management change, they are very likely to reproduce the very same stability issues.

IBM business plan at work

[ntufar]

It is a good example showing why IBM supports Linux:

1. Hook up customers on a cheaply solution based on Linux and MySQL.
2. As customer's data and number of clients grow they will start experiencing scalability problems.
3. Propose much more scalable, reliable, dependable (and much more expensive) solution on AIX, AS/400, Mainframe.
4. Profit!

Re:IBM business plan at work

[Bearhouse]

Shame the article does not state what 'brand' of Linux, although Oracle is mentioned a lot, so could be their's / RH.

You could be on the right lines with the IBM master plan. This in another article linked in the parent:

"In addition, Qantas was still experiencing increased infrastructure costs from an October 2005 datacentre migration, which saw its mainframe environment moved from a Sydney CBD facility to an IBM centre..."

In other words, Blue Blue's got 'em by the balls.

And where's the story?

[dysfunct]

The article seems to lack any details about the switch, except for the quote in the summary and the information that it's currently in the final planning stage and that a local poultry farmed switched to Oracle on Linux from Tru64 (which was misspelled).

In the end, we have no way to determine whether this move made any sense or was FUD by IBM as some other poster implied. AIX on a cheap x86 cluster? Possibly a bad idea. AIX on their IBM mainframe? Possibly a better choice than Linux.

As much as I love Linux it's - as we all should already know - not always the best choice as it's only one of many tools that must fit the general architecture and requirements.

Switching OSs always fixes the problem

[Error27]

At least it fixes the problem until the migration is over, then all bets are off.

In this day and age, if your root cause analysis comes up with "Linux is unstable" then something is screwed up with your analysis. Still this doesn't affect me, so good luck with that. :) AIX is a wonderful OS from what I hear.

Can't say I blame them

[Darth Liberus]

My project has been migrating our 300+ machines from Solaris to Red Hat over the past couple of years. We were all excited at first, now we all miss Solaris.

Why? Because for all the wonderful things we can do with Linux, there's one thing we can't do - we can't keep the machines from locking up. That almost never happened with Solaris, and when it DID happen Sun would figure out what went wrong and issue a patch for it within a couple of days.

Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. A lot. It's done many wonderful things for UNIX and the IT industry as a whole and will continue to do so. But it's not ZOMG TEH BEST OS EVAR! for every project, and I don't think Linus ever intended it to be :)

Re:obsolete?

[trewornan]

A great example of why it makes sense to avoid using MS operating systems - if you have problems with Linux you can move over to AIX without too much difficulty. If you're having problems with AIX move your apps to BSD. Problems with BSD try Solaris.

Having problems with Windows . . . you're fscked!

Re:obsolete?

[arivanov]

In addition to that IBM has done a relatively good job to ensure that porting applications is a breeze, especially to-from linux. It used to be the case where migration from Solaris to linux and back was the easiest. IMO, nowdays, AIX has overtaken it in that respect.

In addition to that, if Qantas does not have sufficiently good application level fallback and has to rely on the hardware being rock solid, AIX is another obvious choice. You get clearly better MTB compared to a PC based server under Linux. Everything else aside you have working hardware monitoring and management which under linux is still a problem. Add to that some noises IBM is making about binary compatibility and you get a fairly compelling deal for a large company which runs a lot of custom software (which I bet was initially written for a mainframe and expects the hardware + OS to have 99.95+ year round availability).

Re:Slashdot them!

[evilviper]

Crashes are infrequent enough that individual airlines can easily drift way off the average.

Congratulations! Way to show your ignorance...

Those stats are based on the past 20 years of statistics, and the number of flights are so extremely, overwhelmingly in favor of the top ~5 or so airlines, that even multiple accidents wouldn't knock them out of their spots at the top. Qantas is so far down, they'd all need to have a dozen crashes for the numbers to change...

Obsolescence is relative

[Savage-Rabbit]

That's why it's a good idea for them. Sounds to me like they're having genuine problems, if they moved to Windows Server 2003 complete with a crowing from Microsoft Headquarters, that might be something to worry about, but I doubt IBM has anything to gain from them moving from Linux to AIX, both of which they have a substantial amount of investment in. I doubt IBM has anything to gain from them moving from Linux to AIX I'm sure that IBM makes more selling AIX licences then Linux licenses. IBM hardware for AIX is probably more expensive then x86 Linux hardware too. Greater costs shouldn't surprise anybody. I know from experience that AIX is significantly more stable than Linux, it costs to IBM money achieve that stability and it requires the customer to use higher quality hardware. In the case of AIX it's 'obsolescence' (If you can call it that, I prefer to think of it as a mature product) is an advantage. Linux is a low to medium end server OS and it does a good job in that market segment. The beauty of Linux is that it is relatively easily interchangeable with any of a number of high end *NIX OS'es if you need super high stability. For somebody like an airline this is a huge advantage, they can use Linux for the less mission critical systems but have a clear and relatively easy migration/upgrade path to a selection of more stable *NIX dialects if their stability requirements for the system in question change. Another point is that you don't get this with Windows if you need more stability or suffer from critical bugs that Microsoft hasn't addressed in months or even years but that are making your life a misery you can't switch to a competing Windows compatible OS that has fixed these issues, there aren't any. As for money, you forgot to mention retraining, but even if you take that and all other cost factors into account money really isn't an object here. It costs them less to throw money at the problem and go with AIX than to put up with the business and customer confidence they are losing because of stability problems with things like their ticket booking systems.

People forget, AIX is a complete package

[SmallFurryCreature]

When you buy AIX you don't just buy an OS, you buy the hardware as well. As Apple fanboys know, it is MUCH easier to get stable software if you know exactly what kind of hardware you are going to run on.

YES it is possible to run linux on this hardware too, this is IBM after all, BUT even then you are running an OS that is designed to run on much more. AIX isn't.

Isn't linux on PC hardware stable? Nope.

And yes, I do run linux on my desktop and it is pretty damn stable, BUT I have had crashes and freezes over the last couple of years. Even one on a light server that only runs apache.

No, nothing like the famed windows crashes and forced reboots every single day BUT if you run a major company and a computer hiccups once every 3 years that still can mean a significant amount of downtime over all your machines combined.

Saying AIX is more stable then Linux is roughly like claiming a diesel truck is more reliable then a pretrol powered van. It is not really a slam against van's, just that trucks are in a different class entirely.

RedHat support ..

[rs232]

'with Linux, there's one thing we can't do - we can't keep the machines from locking up. That almost never happened with Solaris, and when it DID happen Sun would figure out what went wrong and issue a patch for it within a couple of days'

What ever has the Redhat support process come to?

What was their response to your support request?

What exactly was the problem with the machines locking up?

"Qantas ditches UNIX for UNIX"

[argent]

That's how you need to read a headline like that. Some random company, no matter how large, switching some services (I doubt they're switching everything, I doubt they even know what everything they're running on Linux is) from one version of UNIX to another shouldn't be a big deal. Whether it's switching from Solaris to AIX, Solaris to Linux, Solaris to FreeBSD, AIX to Linux, SCO to FreeBSD, HPUX to AIX, SCO to OSX, HPUX to Linux, or Linux to AIX.

The whole POINT to open systems is that you CAN make these kinds of changes without them being disruptive. Nobody should be surprised by them.

Re:not really news

[Anonymous Coward]

Moving from one Unix to another isn't really news.

GNU's not Unix.

what were the stability issues?

[bl8n8r]

Was it an Oracle+Linux stability issue?

"Qantas's original plans called for a totally Oracle-based solution, but
  that was subsequently shifted to a multi-vendor approach to better match
  Qantas's specific needs, according to Young."

Re:obsolete?

[rbanffy]

AIX is every bit as obsolete as zOS.

Not at all.

They are just very stable, very mature operating systems. When you reach that level, not all change is good.

Power5 Platform.

[asciiRider]

Perhaps they want to be able to dynamically toss their app couple of CPU's without downtime. Perhaps they want to dynamically toss it any number of i/o adapters dynamically without downtime. Same goes for memory. Mabye they like the virtualization features, like micro partitioning and Virtual I/O servers.

I know the article talks about stability, but there really are a lot of features on the power5 platform that simply don't exist in Linux land. Cmon, with linux we are talking about PC hardware, PC realiability, PC availability, and PC service. I don't care what high end equipment you put in it, if it can still boot DOS 6.22, it's a freaking PC.

Re:Linux problems

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's exactly the mentality hurting the Linux community.

How would you like it if you went to the doctor, and all he said was to READ THE FUCKING MEDICAL ENCYCLOPEDIA, or called you a loser with the notice to come back when you're capable enough to know what's ailing your yourself?

Re:Astute(and correct) observations

[kellererik]

I was about to write something in the same tune (no, I do not work for IBM, I just administered big IBM boxes running AIX for a while), then I saw your post. Nothing to add but one remark (which should be in your post, IMHO, of course): If Linux is not the right tool for the job at hand, then everyone involved is free to figure out why and, if it's in the interest of the Linux-community, should do something about it. That's the beauty of OSS, isn't it?

Flaming people for using another OS without listening to their reasons for doing so is not helpful at all.