6 ms·

> but newly migrating to AIX is increasingly more trouble than it's worth paying for. Was this a thing even a decade ago? AIX felt like it was in maintenance m

> but newly migrating to AIX is increasingly more trouble than it's worth paying for. Was this a thing even a decade ago? AIX felt like it was in maintenance mode for much longer to me. From my limited perspective, it looked like the vast majority moved to just using Linux, maybe FreeBSD, and buying some batteries-included appliance for anything you couldn't easily self-host and maintain.

Stranger43 4y ago
I don't think i have ever even heard of an unix to FreeBSD migration being done by an large commercial organization, and there is virtually no commercial enterprise software being certified for FreeBSD. It's one of those things where nostalgic old Unix admins who's not really ready to embrace the anarchy of the Linux ecosystem is kind of pretending some clean old fashioned alternative exist, and cling to the myth that FreeBSD is more of an Unix(tm) Successor then Linux. And yes i have also not really heard of greenfield Unix(tm) deployments since maybe 2008 and even then Linux was clearly where most people went when their old custom minicomputer(think DEC PDP 20, AS400 and HP3000) systems had to be replaced by something a bit more standardized.
- pram 4y ago
  We were still doing 'tons' (relatively speaking) of new Solaris on SPARC deployments at Oracle when I was there 7 years ago. They sold an appliance called the SuperCluster that was all Solaris. Someone was buying them lol
  - sys_64738 4y ago
    I think SC was built on top of LDoms if I recall rightly. Been too long.
martintietz 4y ago
AIX is still the go-to platform for a bunch of financial institutations (banks and insurance companies). Although there are a lot of companies within that sector that slowly move to Linux on x86 I know from first hand experience that there are also still a lot of enterprises that swear by running their Oracle/Db2/SAP workloads on AIX on Power.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  I can fully believe that, having no experience in the banking/insurance sector for example, but that sounds like just staying with your legacy setup that just works, not "newly migrating to". That part just sounds insane to me, but maybe someone can share a counter example?
  - martintietz 4y ago
    Those enterprises that I mentioned often not only maintain their current workloads on AIX but even add new environments to it. An example: an internal strategy defines that every mission critical application needs to use Oracle or Db2 as its' data store and another strategy says that all Oracle/Db2 workloads need to run on AIX. In companies with such a setup even today new applications are deployed on AIX. Well, the databases for those applications at least ;) New applications indeed only very rarely land there as they usually are hosted on Linux in some VMware environment.
    - chasil 4y ago
      And this is just foolish. SQLite has DO-178b certification that neither Oracle nor Db2 will ever obtain. You can trust SQLite in avionics, not so with the others.
      - urthor 4y ago
        Really? That's fascinating. Avionics certification is an incredible milestone for FOSS in general.
        chasil 4y ago
        This is the reason why SQLite will never be forked. https://www.sqlite.org/qmplan.html https://www.sqlite.org/qmplan.html
      - coldtea 4y ago
        Well, those companies don't do avionics or care about them, and SQLite would do nothing for their use cases (heavy financial analytics, reporting, OLAP, etc).

Stranger43 4y ago

I don't think i have ever even heard of an unix to FreeBSD migration being done by an large commercial organization, and there is virtually no commercial enterprise software being certified for FreeBSD. It's one of those things where nostalgic old Unix admins who's not really ready to embrace the anarchy of the Linux ecosystem is kind of pretending some clean old fashioned alternative exist, and cling to the myth that FreeBSD is more of an Unix(tm) Successor then Linux. And yes i have also not really heard of greenfield Unix(tm) deployments since maybe 2008 and even then Linux was clearly where most people went when their old custom minicomputer(think DEC PDP 20, AS400 and HP3000) systems had to be replaced by something a bit more standardized.

pram 4y ago
We were still doing 'tons' (relatively speaking) of new Solaris on SPARC deployments at Oracle when I was there 7 years ago. They sold an appliance called the SuperCluster that was all Solaris. Someone was buying them lol
- sys_64738 4y ago
  I think SC was built on top of LDoms if I recall rightly. Been too long.

martintietz 4y ago

AIX is still the go-to platform for a bunch of financial institutations (banks and insurance companies). Although there are a lot of companies within that sector that slowly move to Linux on x86 I know from first hand experience that there are also still a lot of enterprises that swear by running their Oracle/Db2/SAP workloads on AIX on Power.

iforgotpassword 4y ago
I can fully believe that, having no experience in the banking/insurance sector for example, but that sounds like just staying with your legacy setup that just works, not "newly migrating to". That part just sounds insane to me, but maybe someone can share a counter example?
- martintietz 4y ago
  Those enterprises that I mentioned often not only maintain their current workloads on AIX but even add new environments to it. An example: an internal strategy defines that every mission critical application needs to use Oracle or Db2 as its' data store and another strategy says that all Oracle/Db2 workloads need to run on AIX. In companies with such a setup even today new applications are deployed on AIX. Well, the databases for those applications at least ;) New applications indeed only very rarely land there as they usually are hosted on Linux in some VMware environment.
  - chasil 4y ago
    And this is just foolish. SQLite has DO-178b certification that neither Oracle nor Db2 will ever obtain. You can trust SQLite in avionics, not so with the others.
    - urthor 4y ago
      Really? That's fascinating. Avionics certification is an incredible milestone for FOSS in general.
      - chasil 4y ago
        This is the reason why SQLite will never be forked. https://www.sqlite.org/qmplan.html https://www.sqlite.org/qmplan.html
    - coldtea 4y ago
      Well, those companies don't do avionics or care about them, and SQLite would do nothing for their use cases (heavy financial analytics, reporting, OLAP, etc).