IBM AIX

What do you like best?

I have worked with every major (and many minor) UNIX/LINUX distributions over the last 25 years, and AIX is hands down the most stable and configurable one I have ever used. For example, we had 0 seconds of unplanned down time with our hospital system's Electronic Medical Record for the seven years that it ran on AIX.

As with any UNIX/LINUX, if your a skilled and creative administrator, if you can imagine something with regards to configuration, then you can probably make it happen.

Finally, IBM support is excellent. You don't get flunkies when you call in a support ticket. You get a professional, seasoned expert who knows what they are doing, often with a direct transfer from the initial call-taker.

What do you dislike?

The IBM sales team has never been great for us, as it seems bloated and bureaucratic, and they seem to take the attitude that they don't really care if they have our business (maybe IBM is too big?). Also, licensing of AIX is very expensive compared to other operating systems we use, and you don't get any slack regarding licensing (if your contract has expired, you don't get any grace for support...period), so we don't have it deployed for every small use case (firewalls, DNS, etc) where UNIX/LINUX is a good choice; in those cases we use Linux. But the stability of AIX and their Power servers makes up for the licensing cost and subpar sales team.

Also, the initial opening of a ticket seems to take longer than it should, but the support you get is great. Finally, IBM's knowledgebase search for AIX is pretty much useless for me (no relevant results ever -- Google works better).

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Get used to the ODM for some configuration management (much like a Windows registry). It's different from other Unix/Linux and a little hard to get used to, but it does add to the OS stability. Also, AIX is a daunting operating system to those who are unfamiliar with it. It takes some time to master.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Mission-critical databases and applications that cannot go down and with heavy loads work great on AIX. We have run our Electronic Medical Record on AIX (now use Red Hat), and we currently run our Finance/Payroll system and some mission-critical clinical hospital systems on AIX. We also run some enterprise backup (Tivoli) on AIX.