8 ms·

I don't know why AIX would be compelling. Isn't it just another proprietary Unix?

by msla 3y ago

rbanffy 3y ago
It all depends on performance per dollar - POWER and AIX, POWER and Linux, x86 and Linux, ARM and Linux, SPARC and Solaris... It's all about what gets you more work done per unit of money until you retire the box. Is it compelling? Not sure - depends on licensing terms, co-location costs, what are you doing, energy costs, AND compute power. As compelling x86 and ARM with Linux seem to be now, I wouldn't rule out other platforms without an assessment based on the workload. Once I managed to bring a couple Itanium boxes we had from retirement because their then humongous caches were perfect fits for our working dataset and, therefore, for that specific workload they were 10x faster than our Xeons.
- msla 3y ago
  > Is it compelling? Not sure - depends on licensing terms, co-location costs, what are you doing, energy costs, AND compute power. It seems like Linux always wins in terms of licensing, so does it currently lose in any of those metrics? Also, since Linux runs on IBM POWER systems, it looks a lot like IBM's AIX has very little place to stand: Even if the hardware is better (which, judging from experience with other proprietary workstation vendors like Sun, I'd be surprised about) the value proposition of running Linux as opposed to a proprietary OS with less effective support and expensive licensing appears insurmountable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerLinux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerLinux So, I'd be willing to believe that IBM's hardware is better in some ways, but I'm more skeptical about IBM's software in a realm where an apples-to-apples comparison is possible.
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    I would expect AIX to be finely tuned to IBM's hardware and able to exploit the exotic hardware that's bundled with the machine.
    - msla 3y ago
      I mean, you'd have expected that of Solaris and Sun's hardware, too, but that didn't make Solaris on Sun workstations compelling enough to actually survive. That argument seems like a variation on one of the myths mentioned in these posts: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/PCsAreUnixWorkstations https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/PCsAreUnixWork... https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/WorkstationMythology https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/WorkstationMyt... In short, I'm not sure IBM Power machines have any special hardware, and if they do, I'm reasonably sure Linux supports it. It is, after all, a smaller and more stationary target than the weird crap that ended up inside and hooked to commodity PCs that Linux ended up supporting.
      - rbanffy 3y ago
        Sun abandoned the workstation space well before Oracle finished abandoning SPARC and Solaris. As for special hardware, the processor drawer of an E1080 looks a lot like the one of a z16 (without the distributed virtual cache of the Telum, or the insane water cooling blocks): https://power10-ar-experience.com/ https://power10-ar-experience.com/
      - chasil 3y ago
        Power certainly had exotic hardware with the Cell processor in the Sony PS3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor)
    - formerly_proven 3y ago
      My company still runs a lot of stuff on AIX (also mainframes for that matter) and the reason is that it was set up that way in the 90s and no one feels like investing the sizeable amount to move these business-critical applications over to Linux just for the sake of it. Unlike all the other unices that were formerly used here (HP UX, IRIX, Solaris, Super-UX and others) you can still get AIX support so there is nothing forcing the hand of this migration. I expect them to still run some stuff on AIX in 10 or 20 years. Nothing new will ever be deployed to AIX and probably hasn't been in 20 years. At some point the AIX systems will only be around for a handful of niche things and at that point the cost of migrating those over might become lower than the cost of paying IBM off.
  - Spooky23 3y ago
    You run the IBM power stuff mostly because it is the most cost effective way to run Oracle and other CPU licensed workloads. You can’t use VMWare partitioning to avoid paying. But the IBM hardware based stuff allows you to segment the workloads. The other thing is that like mainframe, you can lease CPU on demand. So if your business is cyclical, it may be better to increase CPU November-January by 20%.
  - sennight 3y ago
    POWER is supported on linux to the point where it runs, but it doesn't come close to fully leveraging the hardware. AIX does. Stuff like hardware accelerators, transactional memory, hardware counters, reliability monitoring and self healing, etc. Lots of stuff left on the table because it doesn't perfectly overlap the x86, and it would be a massive undertaking to correct that in the kernel. You'd think that wouldn't be the way it is with IBM and RH... but I suspect there are some market segmentation ideas informing those decisions.
dilippkumar 3y ago
Generalizing the question a little in case someone passes through with an answer: Why should a couple of hackers working out of the proverbial garage building the next unicorn consider IBM as their infrastructure vendor? What are their offerings? How do those stack up against the defaults of aws/Azure + Linux + Postgres/MySql? Assume said hackers are broke.
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  They wouldn’t. These are “deep pockets” platforms. Ramen eaters need not apply.
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    This is the point - IBM doesn't seem willing to help. I'd love to be able to use LinuxONE machines as VM hosts (single thread performance and IO throughput are absolutely ludicrous) but there seems to be no entry-level machine that doesn't imply in a very sizeable investment. And I suspect LinuxONE and POWER10 machines would very cost effective ways for IBM to provide Linux VMs for public cloud environments at better price/performance points that it could be achieved with x86 or ARM. To me, it's absolutely nuts they don't have entry paths to their crown jewels. What will IBM's competitive advantage if everyone migrates from AIX and IBMi to Linux? While there is no IBMi emulator, there are commercial environments that can compile and run COBOL and PL/1 code made for i on x86 Linux machines.
    - easton 3y ago
      I think that was the point of the Red Hat acquisition. "See all those Linux boxes you run? Do you want to have someone to yell at when they blow up? It's either us or Canonical.". There's no way z/OS is going to be free or open-source (if for no other reason than if they open sourced it, you'd still need a mainframe, which means you're going to pay IBM for cloud time), so if hobbyists are going to start with something they'll probably start with Linux. Once they are no longer a hobbyist, IBM will be there to help.
      - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

I don't know why AIX would be compelling. Isn't it just another proprietary Unix?

by msla 3y ago

I don't know why AIX would be compelling. Isn't it just another proprietary Unix?

It all depends on performance per dollar - POWER and AIX, POWER and Linux, x86 and Linux, ARM and Linux, SPARC and Solaris... It's all about what gets you more work done per unit of money until you retire the box. Is it compelling? Not sure - depends on licensing terms, co-location costs, what are you doing, energy costs, AND compute power. As compelling x86 and ARM with Linux seem to be now, I wouldn't rule out other platforms without an assessment based on the workload. Once I managed to bring a couple Itanium boxes we had from retirement because their then humongous caches were perfect fits for our working dataset and, therefore, for that specific workload they were 10x faster than our Xeons.

msla 3y ago
> Is it compelling? Not sure - depends on licensing terms, co-location costs, what are you doing, energy costs, AND compute power. It seems like Linux always wins in terms of licensing, so does it currently lose in any of those metrics? Also, since Linux runs on IBM POWER systems, it looks a lot like IBM's AIX has very little place to stand: Even if the hardware is better (which, judging from experience with other proprietary workstation vendors like Sun, I'd be surprised about) the value proposition of running Linux as opposed to a proprietary OS with less effective support and expensive licensing appears insurmountable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerLinux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerLinux So, I'd be willing to believe that IBM's hardware is better in some ways, but I'm more skeptical about IBM's software in a realm where an apples-to-apples comparison is possible.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  I would expect AIX to be finely tuned to IBM's hardware and able to exploit the exotic hardware that's bundled with the machine.
  - msla 3y ago
    I mean, you'd have expected that of Solaris and Sun's hardware, too, but that didn't make Solaris on Sun workstations compelling enough to actually survive. That argument seems like a variation on one of the myths mentioned in these posts: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/PCsAreUnixWorkstations https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/PCsAreUnixWork... https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/WorkstationMythology https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/WorkstationMyt... In short, I'm not sure IBM Power machines have any special hardware, and if they do, I'm reasonably sure Linux supports it. It is, after all, a smaller and more stationary target than the weird crap that ended up inside and hooked to commodity PCs that Linux ended up supporting.
    - rbanffy 3y ago
      Sun abandoned the workstation space well before Oracle finished abandoning SPARC and Solaris. As for special hardware, the processor drawer of an E1080 looks a lot like the one of a z16 (without the distributed virtual cache of the Telum, or the insane water cooling blocks): https://power10-ar-experience.com/ https://power10-ar-experience.com/
    - chasil 3y ago
      Power certainly had exotic hardware with the Cell processor in the Sony PS3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor)
  - formerly_proven 3y ago
    My company still runs a lot of stuff on AIX (also mainframes for that matter) and the reason is that it was set up that way in the 90s and no one feels like investing the sizeable amount to move these business-critical applications over to Linux just for the sake of it. Unlike all the other unices that were formerly used here (HP UX, IRIX, Solaris, Super-UX and others) you can still get AIX support so there is nothing forcing the hand of this migration. I expect them to still run some stuff on AIX in 10 or 20 years. Nothing new will ever be deployed to AIX and probably hasn't been in 20 years. At some point the AIX systems will only be around for a handful of niche things and at that point the cost of migrating those over might become lower than the cost of paying IBM off.
- Spooky23 3y ago
  You run the IBM power stuff mostly because it is the most cost effective way to run Oracle and other CPU licensed workloads. You can’t use VMWare partitioning to avoid paying. But the IBM hardware based stuff allows you to segment the workloads. The other thing is that like mainframe, you can lease CPU on demand. So if your business is cyclical, it may be better to increase CPU November-January by 20%.
- sennight 3y ago
  POWER is supported on linux to the point where it runs, but it doesn't come close to fully leveraging the hardware. AIX does. Stuff like hardware accelerators, transactional memory, hardware counters, reliability monitoring and self healing, etc. Lots of stuff left on the table because it doesn't perfectly overlap the x86, and it would be a massive undertaking to correct that in the kernel. You'd think that wouldn't be the way it is with IBM and RH... but I suspect there are some market segmentation ideas informing those decisions.

dilippkumar 3y ago

Generalizing the question a little in case someone passes through with an answer: Why should a couple of hackers working out of the proverbial garage building the next unicorn consider IBM as their infrastructure vendor? What are their offerings? How do those stack up against the defaults of aws/Azure + Linux + Postgres/MySql? Assume said hackers are broke.

mixmastamyk 3y ago
They wouldn’t. These are “deep pockets” platforms. Ramen eaters need not apply.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  This is the point - IBM doesn't seem willing to help. I'd love to be able to use LinuxONE machines as VM hosts (single thread performance and IO throughput are absolutely ludicrous) but there seems to be no entry-level machine that doesn't imply in a very sizeable investment. And I suspect LinuxONE and POWER10 machines would very cost effective ways for IBM to provide Linux VMs for public cloud environments at better price/performance points that it could be achieved with x86 or ARM. To me, it's absolutely nuts they don't have entry paths to their crown jewels. What will IBM's competitive advantage if everyone migrates from AIX and IBMi to Linux? While there is no IBMi emulator, there are commercial environments that can compile and run COBOL and PL/1 code made for i on x86 Linux machines.
  - easton 3y ago
    I think that was the point of the Red Hat acquisition. "See all those Linux boxes you run? Do you want to have someone to yell at when they blow up? It's either us or Canonical.". There's no way z/OS is going to be free or open-source (if for no other reason than if they open sourced it, you'd still need a mainframe, which means you're going to pay IBM for cloud time), so if hobbyists are going to start with something they'll probably start with Linux. Once they are no longer a hobbyist, IBM will be there to help.
    - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]