Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!
Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!
-
Congratulations SkipVought on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!
AIX advantage compare to LINUX
- Thread starter Midrange
- Start date
Are you from IBM?
Only IBM people call Wintel the Intel platform.
Well AIX uses memory in a better way than Linux, has a built in Logical Volume Manager while Linux needs a sw to achieve almost the same result.
AIX uses Journaled File System by default and they are very efficient, in Linux you have to use Reiser-FS.
AIX has the very best utilities for cloning/saving a system, from only a tape you can rebuild completely your system.
Linux is a lot easier to configure, because all the configuration files are plain ASCII ones while AIX uses ODM which is a bunch of binary files organized as Classes and Objects.
Linux has built in services for firewalling and it's really easier to find good freeware for it.
Intel platform is a lot cheaper than RISC one ... so
Only IBM people call Wintel the Intel platform.
Well AIX uses memory in a better way than Linux, has a built in Logical Volume Manager while Linux needs a sw to achieve almost the same result.
AIX uses Journaled File System by default and they are very efficient, in Linux you have to use Reiser-FS.
AIX has the very best utilities for cloning/saving a system, from only a tape you can rebuild completely your system.
Linux is a lot easier to configure, because all the configuration files are plain ASCII ones while AIX uses ODM which is a bunch of binary files organized as Classes and Objects.
Linux has built in services for firewalling and it's really easier to find good freeware for it.
Intel platform is a lot cheaper than RISC one ... so
I say wintel...I also say stuff like evil Redmond-tonans! I for one welcome our IBM Over Lords!
Just kidding. If your paycheck depends on your ability to keep a box up for five nines, then I say AIX wins hands down.
Not trying to start some crazy flamer debate, just my opinion as an admin. I have managed systems and databases based on HPUX, AIX, WinNT+, and AS400s. If I had my say in the matter I would pick an AS400 everytime because those things are so freaking dependable its simply ridiculous.
To bad IBM cant figure out how to sell their really good stuff and insist on marginalizing themselves by playing keep up and "me too" with everyone else.
Just kidding. If your paycheck depends on your ability to keep a box up for five nines, then I say AIX wins hands down.
Not trying to start some crazy flamer debate, just my opinion as an admin. I have managed systems and databases based on HPUX, AIX, WinNT+, and AS400s. If I had my say in the matter I would pick an AS400 everytime because those things are so freaking dependable its simply ridiculous.
To bad IBM cant figure out how to sell their really good stuff and insist on marginalizing themselves by playing keep up and "me too" with everyone else.
- Thread starter
- #4
Thanks SBIX & Wiccachic.
Actually i'm an engineer from IBM Business partner. I'm just trying to compare the two operating system running in different platforms.
Sbix, you are right Intel platform is cheaper compare to the RISC one.
Wicchahic, i agree with you, AS400(iseries) still the best best choice in terms of administration and ease of use. Currently they are currently using RS6000 and they are planning to migrate to a LINUX OS with different platform. Based on your experience, where the oracle 9i can run better?
cheers!
Actually i'm an engineer from IBM Business partner. I'm just trying to compare the two operating system running in different platforms.
Sbix, you are right Intel platform is cheaper compare to the RISC one.
Wicchahic, i agree with you, AS400(iseries) still the best best choice in terms of administration and ease of use. Currently they are currently using RS6000 and they are planning to migrate to a LINUX OS with different platform. Based on your experience, where the oracle 9i can run better?
cheers!
Oracle runs very well in Linux, if you get a look to OTN (otn.oracle.com) you will find all the info you need.
It SEEMS (look the capital letter before to bury me with blames) Oracle do prefer Red Hat Linux ... which is also the preferred Linux distribution for IBM Intel based systems.
If you search the net for "Linux vs Windows AND Oracle" you'll find a very interesting comparison test which shows how Linux plus Oracle humiliate Windows plus Oracle ... and gives you a lot of info for your task
It SEEMS (look the capital letter before to bury me with blames) Oracle do prefer Red Hat Linux ... which is also the preferred Linux distribution for IBM Intel based systems.
If you search the net for "Linux vs Windows AND Oracle" you'll find a very interesting comparison test which shows how Linux plus Oracle humiliate Windows plus Oracle ... and gives you a lot of info for your task
This is the test I was speaking about:
I'm sorry to disagree but in my opinion AIX is *a lot* easier to configure and work with. With Linux you really have to know Unix inside out to configure it. And I find the ODM briliant and you don't have to worry about it anyway.
Linux's memory system is superior to AIX and most other similar systems.
AIX has the amazing built-in LVM. Lots of tools and functionality incl. performance tools that you can't get for Linux.
Unfortunately AIX is a lot heavier and slower to run than Linux. AIX is rock stable! Linux is stable as well but still crashes occasionally.
Cheers
we2aresame
Technical User
This kind of case only depends on how much money your customer want to pay. You couldn't persude them from technical side.
I beg your pardon unixfreak but ... the use of memory in LRU caching filesystems is one of the key-point of the AIX power versus other Unix flavours.
The classic buffer pooling of other Unix is a lot less efficent compared to AIX.
ODM is robust ... but not so intuitive like ASCII config files, in order to maintain ODM you have to really know AIX.
Furthermore ... for compatibility reasons AIX has to maintain standard Unix config files and ODM, which often drives to odd situation (if your server name is not listed in /etc/hosts you have problems regardless it's pinned in ODM, but it's really worst viceversa).
If you know some other Unix like Sun Solaris it's usually easier to cope with Linux instead if you come from AIX.
Yes SMIT interface it's really great but actually there are similar tools also for Linux.
I do agree with you with AIX stability ... but as usual this seems to don't concerne customers ... better ... this seems to don't concerce the customer's management
The classic buffer pooling of other Unix is a lot less efficent compared to AIX.
ODM is robust ... but not so intuitive like ASCII config files, in order to maintain ODM you have to really know AIX.
Furthermore ... for compatibility reasons AIX has to maintain standard Unix config files and ODM, which often drives to odd situation (if your server name is not listed in /etc/hosts you have problems regardless it's pinned in ODM, but it's really worst viceversa).
If you know some other Unix like Sun Solaris it's usually easier to cope with Linux instead if you come from AIX.
Yes SMIT interface it's really great but actually there are similar tools also for Linux.
I do agree with you with AIX stability ... but as usual this seems to don't concerne customers ... better ... this seems to don't concerce the customer's management
$.02 from a aix business partner since late 1990...
We provide a full-service application that is build to run on AIX. We started with AIX 3.1 and now have all our clients up to 5.1L. Certainly AIX has its quirks. But so do ALL other OS's. Certainly AIX has been rock solid reliable. Certainly the JFS has been a life saver making file intengrity a non-issue.
However, in these days of ever declining costs of hardware and software, even though IBM has dropped pricing on the RS6K's they still cannot come close to an X86 configuration on price.
When the RS6K started IBM used the POWER CPU. Then they introduced the PPC. Then they went back to the POWER. It has been like watching a tennis game from the sideline <-->.
Back in 1996-97 we developed our web banking suite on the AIX box. It worked well and reliable. Shortly thereafter with an interest in Linux I took a retired X86 box, stuck in a 500Mhz CPU and 512K RAM. I installed Linux on it and its its GUI system adminstrator to configure it. Actually MUCH easier than AIX even counting smit. Everything was done for me. The system came alive. I activated a mailerserver and apache and made available perl and php and mysql. Remember, that box was activated around 1998. It is still running and is still our primary mail server, file repository and web server for some of our web services. Remember, this was a RETIRED OLD P233 box.
Since then we experimented more with Linux while still continuing development on AIX. However, last year we finally replaced all our production web servers (we provide home banking and internet lending services for financial institutions) with AMD Athon XP+ based x86 SFF servers with RH 8 Linux. When we finally switched these processes over to these new platforms their performance compared to the RS6K/AIX boxes was about 10 times greater. All our customers commented on how their home banking because much more responsive. And the programming was the same.
Oh - someone mentioned AIX as the only system that can be fully recovered/rebuilt from tape... Not so. We installed a product called Storix (formerly sysback on AIX) and we made a bootable diskette or cdrom and used it to be a complete system image to tape (we use SCSI VXA drives). And not only have we tested rebuilding a disaster recovery system from tape but now when we setup a new box, we actually use the image tape to "clone" to the new machine. It even handles different disk geometry. The result is that upon completion the system reboots itself and voila`, you've got a fully function working system.
All this for a price that is AT LEAST 1/5th of what a comparable RS6K costs.![[thumbsup2]](/data/assets/smilies/thumbsup2.gif "[thumbsup2] [thumbsup2]")
Our plan over the next 1-2 years is to move our entire product suite over to a Linux/X86 platform still using the same programming, just different hardware and OS. In fact, we're looking at the new AMD Opteron 64 bit processor.
So, that's my $.02 worth based on experience and NOT sales propaganda.
Now back to work!
We provide a full-service application that is build to run on AIX. We started with AIX 3.1 and now have all our clients up to 5.1L. Certainly AIX has its quirks. But so do ALL other OS's. Certainly AIX has been rock solid reliable. Certainly the JFS has been a life saver making file intengrity a non-issue.
However, in these days of ever declining costs of hardware and software, even though IBM has dropped pricing on the RS6K's they still cannot come close to an X86 configuration on price.
When the RS6K started IBM used the POWER CPU. Then they introduced the PPC. Then they went back to the POWER. It has been like watching a tennis game from the sideline <-->.
Back in 1996-97 we developed our web banking suite on the AIX box. It worked well and reliable. Shortly thereafter with an interest in Linux I took a retired X86 box, stuck in a 500Mhz CPU and 512K RAM. I installed Linux on it and its its GUI system adminstrator to configure it. Actually MUCH easier than AIX even counting smit. Everything was done for me. The system came alive. I activated a mailerserver and apache and made available perl and php and mysql. Remember, that box was activated around 1998. It is still running and is still our primary mail server, file repository and web server for some of our web services. Remember, this was a RETIRED OLD P233 box.
Since then we experimented more with Linux while still continuing development on AIX. However, last year we finally replaced all our production web servers (we provide home banking and internet lending services for financial institutions) with AMD Athon XP+ based x86 SFF servers with RH 8 Linux. When we finally switched these processes over to these new platforms their performance compared to the RS6K/AIX boxes was about 10 times greater. All our customers commented on how their home banking because much more responsive. And the programming was the same.
Oh - someone mentioned AIX as the only system that can be fully recovered/rebuilt from tape... Not so. We installed a product called Storix (formerly sysback on AIX) and we made a bootable diskette or cdrom and used it to be a complete system image to tape (we use SCSI VXA drives). And not only have we tested rebuilding a disaster recovery system from tape but now when we setup a new box, we actually use the image tape to "clone" to the new machine. It even handles different disk geometry. The result is that upon completion the system reboots itself and voila`, you've got a fully function working system.
All this for a price that is AT LEAST 1/5th of what a comparable RS6K costs.
Our plan over the next 1-2 years is to move our entire product suite over to a Linux/X86 platform still using the same programming, just different hardware and OS. In fact, we're looking at the new AMD Opteron 64 bit processor.
So, that's my $.02 worth based on experience and NOT sales propaganda.
Now back to work!
raztaboule
IS-IT--Management
Linux is great, but who can say how far Oracle will run well on the distrib you choose ? for example Oracle 9i install well on mandrake 8i but not on mandrake 9.2 . Oracle first prefer Suse , now RH , tomorrow who ???
Oracle will always compile and be stable on AIX that's for sure.
Oracle will always compile and be stable on AIX that's for sure.
I can't say I've worked extensivly with disk management in Linux, as I have with AIX. However, if you deal with a lot of storage and are constantly changing the size of your filesystems, etc. AIX is far superior. I change filesystem sizes on the fly, all the time. Once in a while even moving disks (SSA) between machines without taking down either box (although I will admit that really has more to do with hardware than the OS). I love AIX's LVM and disk management. AIX is also more scaleable. Currently it can handle 32-way machines with a Terabyte of memory and many Petibytes of disk space. AIX has very good memory management. It is more stable (some of this has to do with hardware, because, like a Mac, the OS only has to worry about a handful of system models).
I guess I would tell you to go with Linux and cheap hardware if you need a small web server, or other services that are not mission critical. But, it enterprise class software is needed (large Oracle databases, etc). I would stick with AIX. Sometimes you do get what you pay for.
I guess I would tell you to go with Linux and cheap hardware if you need a small web server, or other services that are not mission critical. But, it enterprise class software is needed (large Oracle databases, etc). I would stick with AIX. Sometimes you do get what you pay for.
timn is right about to hardware and OS being designed for each other. Linux will always have the problem with unknown and dodge HW and drivers.
Unfortunately I'm not too happy about Oracle on AIX. I have supported something like 200 years of AIX up-hours and only experienced 5-6 crashes in that time. One due to HW problems but four of them was Oracle crashing the whole box.
I'd stick with DB2 on AIX but that's again a personal opinion
Cheers
Well lets clear up a few items. JFS is supporeted and available for LINUX, additonally ther eis a LVM for linux (free) I am running both on a scsi system for well over a year not problems. By the way I am also certified on AIX and Have used for over 13 years.Each a place in today IT deptartment
- Status
