IBM AIX

If you rely on your systems to run your business, you need a platform that's reliable. You also need a platform that isn't going to be a bottleneck every time you start to grow and expand. With the AIX® operating system (OS), you can count on your systems to be there when you need them and to be able to grow as your business grows.

AIX runs across the entire range of IBM Power™ Systems based on IBM Power Architecture® technology from entry–level servers and workstations to powerful supercomputers like the 64-core servers, which run some of the most complex commercial and technical workloads in the world. Not only does the AIX operating system scale across systems of different sizes, it scales across different technologies and hardware platforms by delivering binary compatibility. For instance, systems offered by hardware vendors participating in the AIX Multiple Vendor Program are qualified to run AIX and licensed use to the AIX trademark. So, as you move to newer versions of the AIX OS, its excellent history of binary compatibility provides confidence that your critical applications will continue to run.

But scalability goes far beyond simply running on larger systems or faster processors. True scalability requires a comprehensive design that's easily adaptable to changing business needs, permitting you to harness increased processing power with a minimum of disruption.

In real-world terms, this means the AIX OS helps enable your systems to handle more data and users more efficiently—across e-business, business intelligence, enterprise resource planning and other essential business applications.

Furthermore, with the AIX OS, you can upgrade by adding new devices or more storage space when you need it—without costly system downtime. And AIX adds the ability to perform data backups without taking your storage systems offline. This means better control as you maintain and update your systems. On systems based on the POWER6™ processor, the AIX OS can be moved from one system to another without disrupting the workloads running inside of AIX using the PowerVM™ Live Partition Mobility feature of PowerVM Enterprise Edition on POWER6 processor-based systems.

And when the goal is to eliminate downtime dramatically, the AIX OS offers some industry-leading capabilities, such as:

• PowerVM Live Application Mobility – This is a feature of AIX 6.1 in combination with the IBM PowerVM Workload Partitions Manager™ that allows an application inside of a Workload Partition to be moved from one system to another without restarting the applications — a key tool for managing planned outages or workload balance between servers.
• PowerVM Live Partition Mobility — this feature of PowerVM Enterprise Edition offering allows an entire partition, including the operating system and applications, to be relocated between servers based on POWER6 technology without any application downtime. AIX 6 and AIX V5.3 support this capability. Like PowerVM Live Application Mobility, PowerVM Live Partition Mobility enables clients to potentially avoid planned outages and to relocate workloads for load balancing or energy management.
• PowerHA for SystemMirror for AIX software, which permits clustering of IBM Power Systems in a highly available configuration. PowerHA is designed to keep business critical applications and systems operational with minimum downtime. It automatically detects system and application failures and provides the capability of recovering system hardware, applications, data and users while keeping recovery time to an absolute minimum. PowerHA also enables hardware and software upgrades without interrupting cluster operations.
• AIX 6.1 includes many new mainframe inspired features such as Concurrent AIX Kernel Updates, POWER6 Storage Key support and numerous software First Failure Data Capture features to help insure that the AIX operating system is highly available.