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Upgrading to AIX 6.1 or 5.3

The latest versions of the AIX® operating system give your business operational efficiencies, increased utilization and enhanced productivity that you simply can't get from older versions. In other words, it helps your IT infrastructure support the rapidly changing requirements of today’s business environment.

Built-in features like Workload Partitions and Dynamic Logical Partitioning (Dynamic LPAR) and Capacity Upgrade on Demand (CUoD) allow you to shift workloads and add capacity simply and easily, almost instantly. The software upgrade itself is intuitive and if you need assistance, migration services are readily available.

Why upgrade to AIX 6.1?

Binary Compatibility

AIX 6.1 is fully binary compatible with AIX 5 releases
AIX 6.1 is binary compatibly for 32-bit programs created on AIX 5 and AIX 4

Virtualization

Workload Partitions
Live Application Mobility
Support for POWER6™ virtualization features

Enterprise Security

Role Based Access Control
Encrypting Filesystem
Trusted AIX
Secure by Default
AIX Security Expert
Trusted Execution
suid Management

Near Continuous Availability

AIX Concurrent Kernel Updates
Dynamic Tracing with probevue
Support POWER6 Storage Keys
Live Dump
POWER6 firmware–assisted dump
Functional Recovery Routines
Enhanced software First Failure Data Capture

Manageability

Workload Partitions manageability features
Systems Director Console for AIX
Integrated Filesystem Snapshot
POWER6 automatic, variable Page Size
Enhanced default performance tuning

Enterprise scalability

64–bit kernel
64–way SMP
POWER6–enhanced Simultaneous Multithreading
Support for POWER4™, PowerPC® 970, POWER5™ and POWER6 processors

Performance

Simultaneous Multithreading
Industry–leading benchmarks


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Why upgrade to AIX 5.3?

Resource Management

Micro-Partitioning™
Virtual Ethernet
Ethernet sharing
Virtual SCSI disk
Advanced accounting
JFS2 Filesystem shrink

Enterprise Scalability

POWER5 support
Designed for 64-way SMP
Simultaneous Multithreading processor
1024 disk volume group
NFSv4

Development environment

POSIX Realtime APIs
Linker/loader affinity
"procmon" and trace GUI

Datacenter management

SUMA patch tool
NIM enhancements


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Reference center

Analyst reports

An Evaluation of IBM AIX 5L for POWER 5.3 as a Platform for Dynamic IT (139KB)
IDC
This IDC White Paper discusses key trends in computing and how IDC’s concept of Dynamic IT supports a dynamic enterprise as well as IDC's virtual environment software model.

Product specifications and reports

AIX From Strength to Strength (373 KB)
This document summarizes the functional enhancements and new system support added at each update of the AIX operating system, the Bonus Pack, the Web Download Pack and the Expansion Pack.

AIX Version 6.1

AIX Version 5.3

AIX Expansion Pack and Web Download Pack

All AIX data sheet and reports

All AIX white papers