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

Ewwww

[Jethro]

Couldn't they at least switch to a real UNIX? Man I'd hate to be working IT for THAT migration. I've never been a huge fan of ACHES, and I've had to do migrations to it and they were just an incredible pain. IBM have this thing where they like to undercut the competition. Management sees he Bottom Line Price and tends not to listen to IT telling them that, no, you can't just copy all the applications over to the IBM box just because IBM told you that UNIX is UNIX. Gah.

Re:Ewwww

[Devir]

Linux is the roots to where I started my career back in '96. I was outwardly loyal to it for many years and at one time had a linux farm in my place. As long as i didnt try to recompile the Kernel or update the system I was good.

Then I discovered Free and OpenBSD. It was a miracle, I could create a slim custom kernel with almost no issues. I ran this for a few more years. Though I dreaded system update days. Tar configs, install new package, reconfigure test, pray. It'd be a weekend to just to update sendmail/postfix, spam filtering and the DNS servers. To update one thing you'd need to update ALL your libraries and underlying code base because everyone used latest/greatest.

Then I moved to a company that only used Solaris. This was a nice rock solid OS, though a little long in the tooth. While it was good, patching and updates were sort of difficult and lenghty process.

I dabbled in HP-UX as well. THis was a nice system, quick and easy to patch and update. The machine may have taken up a good portion of the computer room but it gave little problems.

Enter AIX. This is an OS that is a dream come. OS updates come in two flavors. The Maintenence/tech levels and the OS update level. If there is a failure in hardware or OS IBM can be onsite within 1-3 hours. They're always a phone call away, and the techs are well trained and knowledgable.

Smitty is their main tool for maintaining the OS. You can resize filesystems at the click of a button, tweak kernel parameters (sysctl in linux) and do a wide range of other things with ease. When I look at our few linux systems these days, I cringe to think i'd need to update them. While they run reliably, i dread patching and updating linux. I dread reconfiguring it. Ask me to patch and configure an AIX box and i'm all for it. It takes a few hours, vs the few days for linux.

With AIX you also have several options for OS imaging and installs. You can run an easy to configure NIM server, or simply run the mksysb command to backup the entire OS. Volume groups (filesystem groups) can be backed up just as easily. If the hardware fails, you can install the mksysb image onto another machine and be back up and runnning in 1-2 hours tops.

I know there are ways to make linux images and backup sets. It just needs 3rd party tools (last i knew) and is oftena pain.

I trust an airport running AIX. This isn't just million dollar planes, this is potentially my life at stake.

Re:IBM business plan at work

[jt2377]

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/04/open_sou rce_and.php

"Ultimately, that means that open-source software developers are subsidizing the big solution providers at their own expense. Writes Riehle: "If it were up to the system integrators, all software would be free (unless they had a major stake in a particular component). Then, all software license revenue would become services revenue."

i believe programmer should get pay for writing software like book writer. do book author get pay when they do a signing tour(service) and no money on the book they wrote which they spend a lot of time on. OSS will only benefit firm like IBM. IBM love it. It won't matter if IBM sell AIX or Linux, IBM win .

Re:obsolete?

[Hal_Porter]

You realise that "no longer developed anymore and largely obsolete" is just another way of saying stable. I know companies that kept using VMS and or mainframe OSs that were almost completely dead - no maintaince updates, no license fees even - right up until the hardware couldn't be fixed anymore.

After that, they had a hellish time with toy PC hardware and OSs. And yup, from the point of view of customers like these, all desktop hardware and OSs are toys. They have a bunch of additional features that don't add to the usefulness of the system at all, and vastly increase it's attack surface. And they need a load of updates/upgrades which occasionally introduce other bugs, and need so the customer needs to pay for 24 hour support to fix the system when this happens.

Re:IBM business plan at work

[snero3]

You are not too far from the truth there.

We started our relationshop with IBM on their intel and Linux X series servers and as we grew they moved us to P series servers running AIX which happens to run all linux binaries just fine and even has the same command set.

The "Upgrade" path was easy and plainless and the cost was spread out over years so it kept management and the accountants happy.

Personally I see it as a winning solution for both Linux and IBM.

Re:"IBM hardware tends to be cheaper..."

[TheMidnight]

When we ballpark hardware for a proposal, IBM hardware is usually 20%-50% cheaper than HP or Sun, and a mere fraction of Alpha hardware.

Sounds about right

[Craig Ringer]

I've been pretty happy with Linux in general, but I'm not thrilled with its network file system support. In particular, NFS has been prone to occasionally leave a particular file in a state where any process that tries to access it hangs in the kernel, and only a system reboot (!) fixes the problem. I'm hoping this was fixed between 2.6.10 and 2.6.20, which I've just upgraded our systems to.

Xen is also less solid than I'd like, at least on the dual Xeon server board I'm running it on. I've had a couple of bizarre issues with Xen 3.0 now that make me wonder if I should go back (again - I tried an older 3.0 before and rolled back due to network bugs) to 2.0 .

Overall Linux is pretty damn good as a server OS, but I can certainly imagine someone finding and moving to a more stable system - though it'd probably be at the cost of ease of administration, speed of deploying services, etc.

Why the surpise? Linux IS NOT the most stable Unix

[keepper]

Ok, put it as experience.. Put it as bias...

But in my experience and that of many others. linux is flexible... fast.. versatile.. but the most stable it isnt.. its part of its design goal. A stable OS, has stable developement practices.. Linux's goal is not to have a stable dev practice. ( see the whole spew about bin drivers.. :( )

Why do you guys think redhat has RHEL... to stabilize linux. go to any other distrib, and well.. things change often.

Fast change does not bode well with stability. Stability comes with time.

You want fast and cheap, go linux.

You want stable, you go commercial unix ( Solaris,AiX these days)

You want a good middle ground.. you go *BSD ;)

( yes, i'm biased, i've run extremely large bsd environments, but currently running a linux one.. and trust me, i miss my bsd )

Re:Slashdot them!

[evilviper]

I'm pretty sure Singapore Airlines has one of the best safety records.

And I'm completely sure you're wrong.

Singapore Airlines/SilkAir is rated 78th in the world. Very few flights, and multiple crashes don't make for a good safety record.

http://www.planecrashinfo.com/rates.htm

AIX C compiler

[12357bd]

My first experience with AIX was auditing some large set of application C code. It was shocking, lots of uninitialized local vars, code assuming it to be 0, and it worked!
I suppouse someone at IBM decided to systematically clear stack var area at function entry... better that than to fix the broken code!.

Re:AIX C compiler

[Anonymous Coward]

They might have made a systemic decision that a) handing with random stuff from one process to another is a security hole

Different problem. The grandparent's talking about the compiler generating code that guarantees local variables are initialized to 0 on every function entry. The previous owner of that memory typically was some other function call within the same process, and there's clearly no security value in that case.

In fact, there's no security value if this is the first time the stack has grown to that size, either. Even if the memory came straight from the kernel, fixing it in the compiler's function entry code generation would mean that the process who is potentially eavesdropping on another is the one responsible for clearing the memory to prevent the eavesdropping. It's trivially defeated by using a different compiler on the malicious code.

To properly prevent this disclosure, the kernel must clear memory before handing it off to a different process (or at least to a different uid/gid). I believe that's done on Linux as well as AIX.

b) if customers' applications can be made more reliable and repeatable then that is a good thing and not something to be ashamed of!

There's a performance price for this choice. And it's typical of the attitude difference between Linux and commercial Unix - Linux developers would never accept sacrificing performance for the sake of some improperly written applications. (And then they'd go on to make some questionable performance choice that would break properly written applications, too. Like requiring fsync() on the parent directory for inodes to hit disk, ignoring that you only have to fsync() the inode itself on every other Unix system.)

Re:"IBM hardware tends to be cheaper..."

[Dadoo]

It's true: you can get IBM to give you a cheaper system, but you won't like it. The truth is IBM makes great hardware and AIX is a great operating system, but you need to be willing to spend big bucks. In my experience - and yes, I use both AIX and Linux every day - IBM may be willing to sell you a system worth less than $250K, but it'll be under-powered, and support will suck.

As far as I'm concerned, IBM had better get their shit together and decide what they want. Either sell inexpensive systems and provide decent support or be willing to tell people they're not worth IBM's time, unless they're willing to spend a serious chunk of change.

Re:well

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, I am both AIX and Red Hat certified so I kinda know what I'm talking about. When you are looking for a true enterprise-class UNIX, on which to base your true mission-critical applications, you've got to choose AIX over Linux every time. There's two major reasons for this, other than the "support from one vendor" argument:

- AIX, or more precisely, the Power5 (soon to be Power6) architecture has virtualization built-in the hardware, at the firmware level. Far more stable and efficient than VMWare, Xen or any other software-based solution.
- AIX is far better in supporting High Availability. The most important reason for this is that AIX has something called the ODM, or Object Data Manager. This is basically a list of all the hardware that's supposed to be in the system, and what the kernel needs to do with it. Including the possibility to detect, but not activate the hardware. If you are doing failover clusters, where certain pieces of hardware (e.g. storage) can only be accessed by one host, and one host only, you can tell the other host not to touch that hardware. And it will not touch it. Obviously this functionality is fully supported in IBMs enterprise HA product, HACMP. Contrast this to Linux, which scans all buses it can find, scans all adapters it can find, and then activates all the devices it can find, automatically. The only way to prevent your standby system to access the hardware is to "STONITH" (Shoot The Other Node In The Head, meaning forcibly take away mains power from the system). Crude.

Now combine all this with the single vendor argument, hardware/software/solution certification and validation and enterprise-class support worldwide, and you may understand why AIX is sometimes a better solution.

You mean Linus didn't invent UNIX???

[Old.UNIX.Nut]

How can AIX be "obsolete" and Linux be leading edge?

/.ers never cease to amaze me with their ignorance of computer history.

1) Linux is just another flavor of UNIX.
2) it is NOT the most stable flavor of UNIX.
3) it is NOT to most feature packed flavor of UNIX.
4) it is far from being the most scaleable flavor of UNIX.
5) it does have some of the most lacking documentation I've seen since Microport UNIX.

This has NOT stopped me from using Slackware since 1994.

/.ers need to get used to the idea that Linus reverse engineered UNIX to create Linux - he did NOT invent a new OS. Linus is walking in the shoes of K&R and many other UNIX pioneers.

Re:You mean Linus didn't invent UNIX???

[TheRaven64]

Linus did not have a copy of the POSIX spec. It was expensive, and he couldn't afford it. This was one of the points raised in the flame war between him and Andy Tanenbaum, who did have a copy of the spec. Linus worked mainly by reading the man pages on other UNIXes and implementing the described functionality, and in some cases writing simple test programs and ensuring that they ran in the same way on Linux and the existing system.

you forgot one

[ushering05401]

4. Bundle the fastest service response time w/said expensive solution.
5. Profit!

IBM made their rep w/me late one night in rural Vermont. I was troubleshooting my client's sole server (an ancient AIX rig) and shit started coming up wonky (hardware!?!?). This wasn't the sort of operation that had spare parts sitting around.

Worse yet, the client had all 14 of their locations (all running dumb terminals) running through this one server and their inventory and POS systems were going to be offline in the morning unless...

I still can't believe the response time for what had to be one of IBM's smallest, most outdated corporate clients. The IBM tech coordinated everything w/a third party on-site technician & we were up & running with shiny new parts in a matter of two hours (most of which was travel time)... Which gave me an hour or two to sleep before calling the company Pres in the morning to explain why they were going to have a big ole IBM bill in the mail.

You pay IBM for the absence of downtime, and it is worth every cent.

Regards.

AIX stopped working for me

[mangu]

Any one PC may or may not work with Linux. And may or may not stop working tomorrow for any of a thousand reasons.

I had to migrate a system from AIX to Linux once because it stopped working from one of the thousand reasons you mention.

It had a customer database in Oracle running on AIX. There was an engineering application that accessed the database and did some calculations in FORTRAN. Then, in version 8, Oracle dropped support for FORTRAN.

The AIX machine was running out of disk space and CPU power, the hardware upgrade meant necessarily going to Oracle 8 and our FORTRAN app would stop working. I don't know, perhaps Oracle 7 would run in the new hardware, but Oracle refused to make a contract for version 7 for that hardware. End result: we had to rewrite the interface between the application and the database. AIX development systems are rather mediocre, so we got a Dell system with Linux.

OK, I know someone will say "AIX development systems are GREAT!!!", but it just ain't so. We tried and tried for months, but the overall code development went much quicker and smoother in an improvised Linux box than in AIX with support from IBM. When you have a problem it's much quicker to google the answer than wait while the IBM support chain reaches the guy who has the solution.

Re:well

[LizardKing]

Linux not stable? Give me a break.

When my second to last employer switched OS from Tru64 to Linux, we saw a massive drop in stability. This wasn't a drop in stability or reliability of our applications, but of the OS and hardware. We had been an Alpha and Tru64 shop, and before that a Vax and VMS one. When the writing was on the wall after Compaq acquired DEC and HP then acquired Compaq, we switched to Linux on HP. This was their supposedly high-end machines, complete with huge RAID cabinets with dual redundant everything. From not needing to reboot the Alphas unless we wanted to reinstall the OS, we went to having to reboot the Linux boxes every couple of days. The RAID arrays would simply stop working, but more often than that Linux would go haywire and lock up with unkillable processes chewing up the CPU's. Despite a very expensive support contract, HP couldn't fix either issue, we just came to expect a visit from the engineer to replace the RAID controllers every so often and frequent reboots. As we were selling a logistics system to run warehouses 24/7, we were not happy and started to look at Solaris on Sun hardware. I left before the switch, but unless HP have managed to solve the Linux and RAID issues I expect that they have lost a customer by now.

Re:Slashdot them!

[evilviper]

Violating /. etiquette and replying to myself...

A significant number of Qantas flights are 24 hours long.

Southwest in nice enough to list their average flight time on their website [1], and that figure is 1.5 hours+.

Delta and Qantas have no such nice figures for public scrutiny. However (circa 2000) multiple sources say[2] Qantas has a ratio of 3150 domestic to every 540 international flights weekly, which is 17%. So (unless Australia is a MUCH larger country than I've been led to believe--or Qantas always flies in circles) none of those (83%) domestic flights could possibly be 24 hours long.

Going out on a limb, and even assuming EVERY single domestic Qantas flight goes completely across Australia at the furthest possible points, the most that could reasonably average is only 2.5 hours. I'll go even further out on a limb, and assume that Qantas doesn't fly to any of the countries remotely nearby, and so ALL international flights are 24 hours long (which is ridiculous in itself, considering just the size of the planet and the speed of a commercial jet). With all of those hugely over-generous assumptions, it still isn't even close to overcoming the factor of 6.56 (number of flights) disadvantage Qantas is at, compared to Southwest.

In the past 20 years:
Southwest flew approx. 21.24 million hours
Qantas (at worst) flew 13.30 million hours

So, even in the most ridiculously, unbelievably, impossibly generous case, Qantas has still only flown half as many hours as Southwest.

[1] http://www.southwest.com/about_swa/press/factsheet .html
[2] http://www.interwoven.com/news/press/2000/0815qant aspr.html
        http://www.shanaberger.com/airlines/qantas.htm

Re:Redhat cardboard © ..

[Builder]

The company using cardboard to prop up a project is an example of the 'small business mentality' that they use. Slick, well organised presentation rooms are an important issue when selling to enterprises. Hell, so is coffee and biscuits delivered to the room every couple of hours on a full day visit, instead of walking your visitors to the vending machine :)

At the time of this visit, I'd been using Linux in businesses for about 8 years. I was trying to sell a bank on Linux, and my boss was a typical head of IT type - he's used to being woo'd by the vendors... Tickets to sporting events, slick presentations, etc. Red Hat just did NOT treat this man like he is used to being treated by IBM, Oracle and Sun, and this made getting Linux into the company that much harder.

Their failures with support later didn't help matters either.

Subscriptions may well take the pain out of purchasing software, although I might argue that when you get down to AS vs ES (fortunately resolved now) and the per-seat licensing costs around RHN Satellite. You buy a RHEL AS Premium subscription. That's it, right ? That would be all inclusive, right? Nope, you're wrong. If you want to manage that server from an RHN Satellite server, you need to buy an entitlement for your satellite server. If you actually want to be able to deploy the server, you have to buy a different entitlement for Satellite (management vs provisioning).

There's also a lot to be said for having the media on a disc should you need to quickly build a machine on an odd network with no Satellite connectivity. More importantly, it's FREE advertising for RH... Don't you ever wonder why MS are so happy to send trials and sample software all over the place? It's because even when the trial is over and the disc is being used as a coaster, it still has the MS logo all over it.

On top of that, a lot of people, especially heads of IT REALLY like to get something tangible when they spend this kind of money. Why do you think HP still ship that weird license pack for iLO licenses?

What I was trying to say with that bit, is that even beyond the technical merits, there just isn't a Linux vendor who can play in the enterprise space in the way that these people are used to being treated.

Re:well

[walt-sjc]

I can see that certain combinations of hardware / software may not be entirely stable, but Linux in an enterprise environment can be VERY stable. I have multiple 8-way HP servers running Centos 4 with 50+ terabytes of storage (each) on an EMC SAN that haven't been rebooted since initial install about a year and a half ago. They systems get VERY heavy usage. Sorry you had problems with HP storage. We looked at HP storage and went with EMC for a number of reasons.

Now I HAVE had problems with a couple DL380 G4's and having them fall off the network occasionally (about once a month) due to some bizarre hardware / firmware issue, but only 2 machines out of about 100 have had that problem.

Re:obsolete?

[muirhejs]

I support 300 servers for a large financial institution. The cost of any one of them being down is up to $500,000/hour. AIX is our solution of choice. I love Linux and use it exclusively at home, but Linux simply isn't ready for this level of responsibility-- yet. We are starting to put some lesser-critical applications on Linux and we have it as an OS offering in our UNIX space, along with Solaris.

Some things that I'd like to see Linux achieve before it's really ready for prime time:
* Achieve a mature high-availability model. With the kind of uptime we require, I need a clustering solution that is very reliable and eliminates all single points of failure
* SAN support. SAN is still a relatively new (10 years or so?) technology. There are still quirks to work out and even Solaris and AIX occasionally have issues with them. It's a complicated technology. Add "Synchronous Data Replication" features and it gets more complicated.
* Drivers, Firmware, and Microcode. Because of the diverse hardware Linux runs on, I don't think enough attention has been paid here.

- John

Wow! 138 Comments So Far...

[filesiteguy]

I find it actually funny that this is even really newsworthy. I'm sure the pointy-haired bosses at Quantas figured they'd save either time, money or staffing hours dealing with one vendor. Obviously they didn't want to go with MS in their server room, but they went from one *nix to another.

If you look a little further, you'll notice that the issue was with Financial operations. A few minutes with my good friend, google, turned up some tasty bits. For example here: http://www.fujitsu.com/global/casestudies/WWW2_cas estudy_Qantas.html

It says, "So when Qantas, Australia's largest airline, merged their international operation with a domestic airline and found themselves wrestling information among multiple data systems, something had to be done. The existing architecture was complex, slow, costly to operate and not very reliable. The response was IRIS, the Integrated Revenue Information Solution."

Guess what platform Fujitsu (the vendor) runs IRIS on...?