Linux vs AIX, hmmmm??? All right, I'm an AIX geek *and* a Linux geek, so let me wade into the deep end, here.
#1) Linux and AIX are not equivalent. As a friend once jokes, "AIX AIn't uniX" but, then Linux ain't either... but they have different strengths. For an I/O bound application, IMHO, AIX will come out ahead, since, to be honest, it's for "business"... and, additionally, AIX is far closer to a "hard" real-time system (without _being_ a real-time OS, I've worked with those before, like LynxOS) than Linux is. Wanna crunch numbers? Don't choose AIX unless there are other requirements. I won't go into a long and involved lecture, here, about the differences. #2) AIX handles, on the pSeries boxes, far more types of disk controllers than Linux. SSA, for instance. SCSI and FibreChannel, though, and the systems meet in the middle. This is one reason LPAR+VIO on a p5 supports Linux so well. (Yes, I know my way around p5 virtualization.) Heck, Linux handled the "micropartitioning" available with LPARs on a p5 before AIX 5.3 had gone GA... but that's the nature of the beast. VIO and LPAR made it easier to put up Linux instances because it took care of the I/O device management issues. The above should be clear in explaining why I would choose AIX for some jobs and Linux for others; they each have their strengths. Each also has weaknesses, as well. For a customer, however, Linux has the advantage of allowing you to make an investment of sweat equity to fine-tune it to _your_ workload. It's missing some of the extra instrumentation that AIX has, but, then, this may (or may not) be important. Linux evolves quickly. AIX does NOT evolve and/or adapt as quickly, though, in my limited experience, it still evolves faster than Windows without becoming a quasispecies. Linux, as I see it, has been ready for Prime Time for a LONG time. Just because it ain't AIX doesn't mean it doesn't have a role to play. Any-- heck, probably ALL-- systems are studies in compromises. No one system can do everything even though some vendors, like one of the more infamous, headquartered in the Pacific North-Wet, would like you to think theirs is. Now if only AIX could run on Intel Boxen... and zSeries boxes, though I don't see IBM porting it to a wristwatch or PDA. So, there, you got a viewpoint from someone who's been WATCHING mainframes but has no practical experience there... but I have been drooling for years. I _do_, however, know my way around the guts of Linux, *BSD, Unix SVR2 and even LynxOS... and have been well educated in AIX, even if my ceritifications got dated 'cuz my food chain when I worked at IBM didn't see any value in keeping them up. As an aside, just for laughs, I knew enough about the internals of AIX from the Performance Management as well as Data Structures classes I took to get a laugh when I first heard about SCO's suit: as near as I could tell, AIX was a weird system with the thinnest of veneers to make it act vaguely like a Unix system. So... Does that answer any questions? Or have I muddied the water some more? And, yeah, my current gig as a red-shirt has me supporting a major "real-time-ish" SCADA-ish app on some big honkin' HP/UX boxes. I kinda miss my root privileges... and these folks seem to joined to M$ at the wrists and ankles. Hopefully I won't get too stale... At home, BTW, I run both openSuSE 10.2 _and_ Ubuntu... and have weaned my wife almost completely off of Windows, she is so very much happier w/ Ubuntu than Vista... but she sometimes does miss MacOS X. -- John R. Campbell Speaker to Machines souperb at gmail dot com Why OS X? Because making Unix user-friendly was easier than debugging Windows ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
