In today’s era of hybrid cloud, there is an increased demand for flexible infrastructure, continuous availability, scalable and sustainable compute, enhanced security and data protection, and increased integration with open technologies. As businesses navigate these dynamic market conditions and IT infrastructure demands, they require an operating system they can rely on that can be optimized to adapt to these changing business needs.
With the introduction of IBM AIX 7.3 Standard Edition, IBM addresses these needs while also continuing its tradition of providing new functions that can help dramatically improve system availability, scalability, performance, and flexibility while maintaining binary compatibility to ensure a quick and seamless transition to the new release. Combined with Power10, AIX 7.3 enables clients to modernize with a frictionless hybrid cloud experience to respond faster to business demands, protect data from core to cloud, and streamline insights and automation. AIX 7.3, coupled with IBM POWER8®, and later, technology-based systems, delivers a computing platform designed for hybrid cloud that is optimized, secure, and adapts to evolving business demands.
This means AIX 7.3 has been released – well, sort of, since it won’t be actually available until 10 December.
I always find these niche survivors of the UNIX wars quite interesting. There’s not many still going, with AIX, Solaris, and MacOS probably being the last big proprietary UNIXes still in active development (and Solaris is kinda debatable)
It really makes me sad for what we have lost in the meantime, with the dominance on the Wintel monopoly and the loss of smaller hardware manufacturers and the variety of CPU architectures and operating systems they brought along. The computing world of 30 years ago just felt more interesting and less stale than it does today.
The 90s were the last great decade for diversity of pretty much everything.
/Get off my lawn! 🙂
The123king,
Yeah, if we don’t do anything to stop it, corporations on their own tend to consolidate to the point of duopolies and oligopolies holding all the cards and consumer are left with fewer choices. It’s one of the major ironies of pure unfettered capitalism. It results in such inequality that power and control replace merit as the driving force.
And Solaris is barely still around…
There’s lots of activity in the computing world. It’s just that is happening elsewhere than what you are used to.
It takes almost 1 billion dollars to bring a new high performance CPU or SoC to market, so the amount of vendors that can afford such a development has been culled down significantly.
However, the flurry of activity/experimentation has moved towards problems that are more open ended.
30/40 years ago the issue of ISA/OS etc were the open ended problems of that era. And they’ve been solved (for the most part) and which is why we’re seeing more iterative refinements of the same themes that were reached a while back.
HW is becoming more and more abstracted, so there is more activity on areas that are higher level in the software realm.
I can’t help but admire IBM’s ability to string buzzwords together. They’ve got a style that is unique and it really does take talent to say so much in a coherent way without actually saying anything. Maybe our politicians should take lessons.
Snark aside, it’s cool that AIX still survives. I don’t have a machine to run it on and have never been fortunate enough ( or unfortunate depending on who I’ve asked) to work with it. It can’t be any worse than Windows Server though. I’ll take a quirky UNIX over that abomination any time of day.
I was thinking the same thing. I worked for an IBM shop for a few years and their buzzword game is really top notch. They’ve taken it to an art-form, so many words, so little meaning.
Unfortunately with things like Watson, they forget to make something that can be used under all the marketing. I do appreciate they are still making AIX though. I’ve seen companies run power systems with years of 100% uptime.
Nobody does marketing like IBM. The sad thing is that they spend as much marketing internally (propaganda targeting their employees) as they do externally. It’s really sad.
With that said, I can guarantee you that it’s working. Most people believe IBM is exactly what they say they are.
…snake oil … https://techmonitor.ai/leadership/strategy/the-man-who-sniffed-out-the-snake-oil-leaves-the-stage-farewell-mr-olsen-080211
A large telco I used to work for in the late 90’s primarily used AIX boxes in their NOC (network operations center). I got to work on one in a support role on more than one occasion, though rarely. Don’t remember much about them. The hardware seemed very nice and was reminiscent of the old PS/2 PC models, only larger. I seem to remember boot times taking a rather long time. Good thing is, you rarely had to reboot them.
CompUSA ran their stores POS and inventory system (IMS) on AIX with Wyse style terminals throughout the store. I discovered that IMS had a bug report function. To do this, IMS dropped you into vi, and exiting vi brought you back to IMS. So, one day, I had the bright idea to use :sh in vi. Bam, shell prompt! Hmmm, this doesn’t look like a standard user account shell prompt. Sure enough, one whoami later and I find out I’m root. Quick telnet into 5 other stores, login using those stores generic logins and sure enough, each login has limited access but as soon as IMS is started and dropped into the vi bug report function I got a root shell. Reported to Corporate, but it never got fixed. The question I never got answered was why either the inventory system or the bug report was being launched as root.
If you want a “sign” about the death of SVR2 and friends like AIX, just look at number of releases over the past 15 years.
This post reminded me that it’s been over 20 years since IBM spraypainted “Peace, Love and Linux” around cities as part of its replace-AIX-with-Linux push. Despite new AIX releases existing, it’s been clear for a long time that it’s not a priority. If anything it does speak to IBM’s commitment to compatibility that they’re maintaining a product 20 years after publicly deprecating it.