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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."
AIX is really old, mature, and definitely still maintained. It's a very good system.
I expect it will eventually be retired and replaced with Linux, but that's still years down the road. Right now, it offers some advantages, particularly on minicomputer class hardware.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
> Wait, who's Quantas?
Qantas is one of the world's oldest Airlines, and Australia's biggest airline. It also has one, if not the best, aviation safety record of any airline, ever.
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!
AIX is hardly obsolete. Over half of our clients with large server systems use IBM hardware and AIX. IBM hardware tends to be cheaper than other vendors, and AIX itself is a very stable operating system and easy to configure and maintain via SMIT. There are many advantages to AIX: cheaper hardware, powerful POWER5 architecture to run on (IBM hardware scales quite nicely), decent support, and it is maintained by one of the oldest technology companies in America. Compared to Solaris and HP-UX, it's one of the best UNIX flavors out there, and doesn't have the stability problems seen with Linux. Linux is stable, but still quirky.
IBM still maintains AIX. It's not reaching end of support like Tru64 or OpenVMS, and with POWER6 and POWER7 coming in the future, will likely enjoy a long, long support future.
Moving from one Unix to another isn't really news. Moving to Vista would be news.
C'mon, we've seen this so many times. They're only making that announcement so that Linus will come to the party and offer them a fantastic price cut on Linux.
It's worked for just about every large company that's threatened to abandon Microsoft.
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...
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Besides mainframe and midrange systems, that's what you'd call "big iron".
They are also currently embroiled in a AU$11.1 billion (US$9.18 billion) takeover bid by private equity - which I have seen first-hand to make for interesting managerial decisions, particularly in I.T.
If successful (latest news today suggests it won't be...) it would be one of the biggest takeovers in Australian history.
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.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Agreed x2.
.Net or even [relatively-mature] VB6 for them (the guy who interviewed me had a severe dislike for Microsoft - they tried them and got burned once). They wanted something that worked like a piston and never stopped.
companies need that stability to run. I went for a job interview in Oz for a company that processes sugar cane (CRS). When they're crushing the cane to get the sugary goodness out of it, they're running several plants 24/7 for several months. Furthermore these plants are spread over about 1000 km as the crow flies (indeed they use a plane to get between plants in emergencies). In their quest for stability, they use C and Fortran ("What?" I hear some of you young critters say) on VAX to run their automated weighing machines.
No fancy
Good on Qantas. Their in-flight meals aren't too bad either (I flew over from New Zealand - the country that sells Dells in shops).
Couldn't stand the weather
Would that be called "Expenguination" ?
> 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.
Surrely, if they are having problem's with Linux stability, it must be the general manager for segmentation's fault?
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
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Not even remotely true. There are at least a dozen airlines with better records. Qantas benefits from it's small number of flights, and as soon as there's one crash, their safety record will instantly go through the floor.
I think I'd give the honor of best safety record to Southwest, who has flown 6-7 times more flights than Qantas, while still having zero accidents.
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/rates.htm
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Qantas never crash... on linux
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.
:/- spoon(_).
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.
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.
they got a notice from SCO
What?
At least it fixes the problem until the migration is over, then all bets are off.
:) AIX is a wonderful OS from what I hear.
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.
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 :)
Beauty is just a light switch away.
For the record it is spelt Q without the U, QANTAS is an acronym for "Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services."
no, you can't just copy all the applications over to the IBM box just because IBM told you that UNIX is UNIX. Gah.
I was under the impression that with AIX 5L, the whole point of it is you can. AIUI, the "L" stands for Linux - the big change between AIX 5 and 5L was a compatability layer so all you should need to do is recompile something written in Linux and it should just work.
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 )
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!
To AIX's credit, it has a lot of features which are still relatively immature by comparison on Linux. Logical volume management and RAID integration is the first that springs to mind; others include "stable as a 20-ton block of concrete".
On AIX, every volume is an LVM-managed one. Even the root volume. The logical volume manager is more like EVMS2 than LVM. (IIRC IBM developed EVMS2, which might explain that).
1998 called - they want your argument back.
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).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Well, A) We were going from Solaris to AIX, and B) Some people actually use applications they buy as a product, not as source code. And some managers aren't happy when you tell them "We need to rebuy this really expensive software now", and some are REALLY not happy when you tell them "I told you this months before we moved to AIX. In fact here's an Email trail showing me telling you that about 50 times in the past 6 months."
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
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
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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!.
What's in a sig?
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.
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.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Well, by far, most accidents occur during take-off and landing, so number of "flights" isn't a bad statistic to use. If you've got a better source for accident statistics by airline, by all means, cite it.
If there's anything to learn from this thread, it should be that most people's impressions and opinions are simply baseless and wrong... I strongly suggest finding hard numbers (as to average flight lengths) before jumping to such conclusions. You may well find the actual figures to be quite the opposite of what you believe they should be...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
Southwest have NOT had zero accidents. They've had at least two runway overruns in the last three or four years (one of them with fatalities, and the other was just a few yards from being fatal since the aircraft nearly hit a gas station).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
"Isn't IBM AIX really old, not really developed any longer and largely obsolete? How can moving from linux to that be a good idea?"
AIX is mature, it is stable, it is well maintained, and it is not obsolete. AIX hardware and software are more much more reliable and stable than Linux and the hardware that it runs on. AIX will be supported for a very long time. Linux is very good in smaller, less demanding environments; AIX, HPUX, and Solaris are the gold standard of large enterprise level systems.
10 years ago, I jumped onto the Linux bandwagon. Last year, I started brushing up my Solaris skills and I'm now working to add some Sun certs to my RHCE.
:)) and forsake many useful updates and features in tools like Samba and then you'll get your stable API / ABI. Or you can go with a bleeding edge distro and never have ISV support for your products. Neither of these is a great choice for us, we'd like something in the middle, but I can't find a commercial vendor providing this today.
Linux just is NOT ready for the enterprise. Red Hat, the 'biggest' Linux company out there just hasn't learnt to run with the big dogs yet.
Technical issues about the OS aside, Red Hat just don't present as a professional company. After dealing with Sun and MS for years, dealing with RH is a bit of a joke. £300k doesn't even buy you any media! A visit to their head office in North Carolina sees the presentation done from a projector on a desk, with bits of cardboard to stop it wobbling. Trial versions of the software to keep your skills up to date ? Don't be silly - you have to use CentOS for the free tools and you're SOL for their closed source tools like Satellite or RHN Proxy.
Once you go from there to the support issues, RH take an even bigger beating. 'Just reboot it' is NOT the first (and for 3 hours, only) option I want to hear when I have a production server locked up. And 3 hours to escalate to second line is NOT good enough for a platinum contract (Premium in RH terms?). If I wanted that kind of solution and support, I'd go back to sending my cheques to Redmond.
At a technical level, Linux is NOT keeping up and is barely fit for datacentre purposes. Only recently has the LVM stuff got to a useful level where we can do multipathing (with IO on both paths) without needing third party software. It's not great yet, and the tools to maintain it are badly documented, but since we just can't get Veritas for 64bit RHEL4 (or couldn't when I checked a few months back), it's the only choice we have.
The constant changes to the API and ABI are a total PITA for ISVs. You can either go with RHEL / SLES (or CentOS if you're broke like me
Lastly, the tools. I'd really rather not get started on the issues with the tools that RH provides to manage systems. Suffice to say, not being able to do LVM setup using the text installer came as a bit of a shock. And when confronting RH on the severe deficiencies in their text-based admin tools, I was just told to spend 8k on a closed source RH product to resolve these... How much MORE like MS can you be? Yeah, we know the base product is a bit broken, but that part isn't really our focus - here, try this expensive fix.
Documentation is in a similar state with some stuff being very well documented and other stuff, poorly if at all.
In the end, Sun still have a better understanding of what the enterprise needs, both from a support and an OS point of view.
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.
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yes, you are right. I have seen large BSD deployments and they are extremely stable. Personally, I am a big proponent of FreeBSD and OpenBSD. They are very stable which might explain why there is less bleeding edge hardware support. I am actually not surprised at all.
There's freedom of choice with Microsoft
If you have problems with Windows XP, you can move over to Windows Vista.
And as an added bonus, then you'll realise that things that much fscked up under Windows XP in comparison, and you'll happily move back to XP.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
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.
'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?
davecb5620@gmail.com
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/factshee
[2] http://www.interwoven.com/news/press/2000/0815qan
http://www.shanaberger.com/airlines/qantas.htm
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
Linux/x86 has forced IBM, Sun and HP to be competitive with much cheaper hardware and support and when pricing servers with 32GB+ of ram, there isn't much difference between Linux/x86/support and AIX/HPUX/Solaris and when you do TCO analysis, they are all very similar.
There has been a major drop in the high end *nix distributed computing environment pricing brought on by Linux, to the point where it isn't that much of a cost savings switching between Linux and HPUX/AIX/Solaris (or the other way). I don't agree that AIX is more stable than Linux, but AIX isn't that much more expensive anymore.
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."
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
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.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
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.
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.
Ok, so here goes.
./ account number is 5 digits(as well as my ICN number, yeah who cares). I am also in school working with HPC(High performance computing) building, programming and maintaining beowulf clusters. My point is this, I have more experience with Linux than most.
.debian.org/msg17434.html
Big Freaking Disclaimer, I work for IBM in support...
That being said, I use Linux as my primary desktop both at work(thank you IBM) and at home. Debian on both, though I do have to say, I just built a MythTV box and used Ubuntu(faster updates/multimedia/interface acceptable to the female counterpart) and I am VERY impressed with Fiesty Fawn 7.0.4. I have been running Linux since the pre-1.0 kernels and it has been my desktop of choice since 98 and my
Being that I work at IBM, I also have alot of experience with AIX. While personally, I hate AIX(any UNIX that cannot be administered via vi is shit in my book, take that any way you like), AIX is EXTREMELY stable, and IBM makes sure of it. I have seen the testing they do to both the hardware and software(OS level at least) and it is centered around stability/reliability first and foremost, followed closely by serviceability(tracing facilities, error reporting/recording), performance and then ease of use. Now, this order is not true of all commercial UNIXs, Solaris is used more in scientific applications/number crunching and tends to focus a bit more on performance over serviceability(surely) and possibly even stability. I have seen more Solaris machines bite it than AIX machines, but this is more likely hardware related that OS related. In either case, they are inherently more stable than Linux.
Yeah, I said it, and its true. While Linux is a WONDERFUL and EXCITING desktop OS, and makes a damn fine department server, the OS itself, and not even so much the OS, the kernel is pretty darn stable(dont believe me, boot up a Linux machine and dont do anything, it will run until something harware/power related dies). It is the surrounding libraries and applications that are not quite up to snuff. We in support see this a number of times. Here is an example:
Currently today, right now, PDKSH that is available on http://web.cs.mun.ca/~michael/pdksh/ is completely broken when it comes to job control. Now most of you have no clue what I mean by that, but a quick explanation is placing jobs into the background with a '&' at the end of the command line. Now programmatically, there are a number of way to do this from the shell and on PDKSH, they are completely broken. I tracked this down back in 2002 and a bug report was submitted to the developer of PDKSH. Every major Linux disribution shipped this binary in 2002, so we actually had to package and ship our own version of pdksh to make things work. Redhat later switched to AT&T's ksh, because pdksh was too broken to fix for the most part. Roll forward to 2004, we ran into a really strange problem with one of the products I support(Tivoli) and worked it for 2 months, tracing calls/checking stack traces/and general debugging and in the end, it worked right back around to this bug in pdksh. The customer had installed our pdksh, but later, had replaced it with SuSE's, which at that time was still broken. A colleague of mine finally sat down, on IBM's dime mind you, and took the time to report this bug to all the major distributions, here is the one from Debian:
http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists
This is just one package. There are a thousand stories out there that are the same. I know we regularly submit libc patches as well because we find stuff that is borked in there.
So all in all, its not really the kernel, so much as it is the rest of the building blocks that one must use within Linux. You could use your own compiler and libraries, but then are you really using
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
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.
Speaking as someone with both a RCHE and an AIX cert, I have to disagree.
First, HACMP is an outdated technology.
HACMP setup/configuration is definitely not for the faint of heart nor untrained, but version 5.3 (I haven't used 5.4 yet) is a very polished and stable product. The only issues I have ever have with a HACMP cluster event were directly related to the application or admin error.
Second, the ODM is a piece of crud...Give me a proprietary db that I can't see, and I'll throw my hands up.
odmget, odmput? Not elegant, but the point is that you rarely should have to directly interact with the ODM.
Lack of a 'true' single user level.
In 10 years I have yet to see a need to do this on an AIX server.
LVM is less than adequate. Yep, I paid $1M (US) for a big honking machine, but can't figure out how to convert PP to Mb. ouch.
lsvg vgname, get PP size in MB, multiply or divide as needed
system tuning/kernel is a bit archaic.
Can't argue too much with this one (as far as ease of tuning), but with the assistance of SarCheck you can wring every bit of performance out of AIX.
Ignore anything I said above, I actually agree with everything you believe - mod accordingly.
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?
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.
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.
s estudy_Qantas.html
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_ca
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...?
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Forget Linux, my hand alone would have trouble with a ten-button mouse.
Having done the same move (Tru64 to Linux) and had similar teething problems I can state the following as fact.
The stability issues we had were all down to HP's drivers for their 6404 Raid cards and the Insight Agents.
If we removed the agents (or switched them off if I remember right) the system became solid as a rock.
A few months of working "with" HP on the issues had bugs fixed in the next version of the drivers and the Insight Agents.
I left that company a few years ago now - their big Linux machines haven't fallen over since then. Downtime only for CPU upgrade and extra RAM. How do I know? I still get SMS alerts from HP SIM when these machines go down (or don't as the case may be).
I'll never argue against using Tru64. Those machines were as solid as it got. But the cost of hardware was too much. Moving to Linux gave us much better bang for buck and (eventually) machines that were every bit as reliable as the Tru64 Alphas.
Cheers
D
Actually, I would say the analogy would be more accurate if done this way: ... Start? ... Doctor, something feels wrong. I think my wrist is broken.
... Um, something is wrong with my wrist. ... Could you take an X-ray or something? ... uh, the one in the hospital's default location.
Windows-user patient visiting Windows-OS doctor:
Doctor: Welcome to My Visit. Please note: all information contained in this visit is proprietary medical information. Am I a real doctor? Would you like to call the ADA and ensure my license is Genuine?
Patient: Uh, that's okay. I'd rather just get on to what's wrong.
Doctor: Okay. Say "Start" to begin!
Patient:
Doctor: What's that, you say? Your breath is rotten? Here's a prescription for breathmints. Is that what you needed?
Patient: No, not my breath, I said my wrist. Could you take a look at it?
[ Doctor shines light in Patient's ears. ]
Doctor: Your problem appears to be a herniated disc, but because you have red hair, I am unable to offer any treatment. Would you like me to submit a report about your hair color to the publisher of my medical texts?
Patient: Uh, no thanks.
[ Doctor runs quickly out of the room. ]
Linux-user patient visiting Linux-distribution doctor:
Doctor, skimming a textbook: This is Gray's Anatomy, 23rd Edition. Reading skeletal charts... done. Reading cardiovascular charts... done. Reading male groin chart... done. Reading female groin chart... WARNING: PATIENT DOES NOT HAVE FEMALE OPTIONS INSTALLED---CONTINUING ANYWAY. Reading blood pressure chart... rescaling... done. WARNING: YOUR LOCALE IS SET TO "IMPERIAL UNITS". METRIC UNITS WILL BE THE ONLY TYPE SUPPORTED IN THE 40TH EDITION! Done.
[ Doctor stares blankly at patient. ]
Patient:
Doctor: Ok.
Patient:
Doctor: What primary focus depth for the X-ray?
Patient: What do you mean?
[ Doctor hands patient a book on X-rays. Patient skims through for a few minutes. ]
Patient: Oh, aim for about 2cm penetration for my wrist.
[ Doctor X-rays wrist. ]
Doctor: Your X-ray has been placed in the hospital's default location. Consult with the front desk staff to change where your X-rays are stored.
Patient: Can you tell me what's wrong?
Doctor: I don't understand.
Patient: Please examine my X-ray for problems.
Doctor: Which X-ray?
Patient:
[ Doctor examines X-ray, which takes a mere fraction of a second. ]
Doctor: Ulna and Radius are properly spaced. All ligaments are intact. Capitate is cropped at the edge of the slide. Pisiform is intact. Triquetrum is intact. GRAYS_SCAPHOID_CHECK: STUB! Continuing. NOTICE: Lunate is not intact.
Patient: Does that mean I need surgery?
Doctor: Please see "Lunate HOWTO."
[ Doctor hands patient a file of papers. Patient reads through them. ]
Patient: Uhh, I think I just need a cast for two months, from what I can make of this. I guess I also need to schedule for a follow-up when it's time to remove it.
Doctor: What color would you like your cast to be? What day of the week two months from now?
Patient: White is fine. And, a Monday, preferably in the morning.
Doctor: "White" is ambiguous. Say "fine" again to get a list of possibilities. We have appointments beginning at 1300-hours Universal Coordinated Time.
Patient: Just use the first kind of "white" you have, I don't care. Umm, that would be starting at 9AM Eastern/daylight, right?
Doctor: "White, beige-white" chosen. Yes, that is 1300-hours Universal Coordinated Time.
Patient: Okay. Schedule me for 1300 then.
Doctor: Okay. Scheduled.
[ Doctor applies cast to patient. ]
Patient: Thanks. Do I pay here, or out front?
Doctor: Payment is optional. All our services are essentially free-as-in-beer but funded by contributions. More importantly, though, all of our medical treatment is free-as-in-speech. This means that you are allowed to discuss your treatment with whomever you like or take not
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
According to TFA, the decision was made by someone called "Suzanne". Conclusion: AIX looks nicer than linux, or comes with more chocolate.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."