It has been 25 years since AIX was launched. What have
been some of the major innovations that IBM has done on this
platform?
Yes, 25 years ago, IBM launched Advanced Interactive eXecutive
(AIX), a Unix operating system called for the IBM RT PC. The system
ran on a RISC processor codenamed “ROMP” (for Research
Office Products Division MultiProcessor) and was originally
marketed as an engineering workstation. In 1990, the major
innovations started with the introduction of AIX v3. Thereafter, we
have been innovating the AIX after every two years.
Some of the major innovations on the AIX are:
- 1990- AIX V3 on the RS/6000 on the first power processor
- 1994-AIX V4 with support for symmetric multiprocessing
- 2001-AIX 5L provides logical partitioning virtualization on
Power4
- 2007-AIX 6 contains workload partitions
- 2010-AIX 7 has built in clustering and the ability to host an
earlier version of AIX
Of course, AIX was not evolving alone – since that original
release on the RT PC in 1986, the capabilities of Power processor
and hardware grew from a single processor running at 5.9 MHz to
today’s Power 795 running up to 256 Power7 cores at 4.25
GHz.
What has been the contribution of AIX Lab in India in
this evolution?
Across the globe, IBM has two AIX labs, one in Austin and other
in India. AIX India Development Lab had significant contributions
across the breadth and depth of AIX operating system (OS). Aligning
well with the IBM globally integrated enterprise focus, India teams
continue to work closely with other global labs to drive the AIX OS
strategy, roadmap and implementation.
The India development team contributes across key technology
areas like virtualization, base Kernel, cluster computing,
networking, security, performance, device drivers and high
availability.
It is widely perceived that Unix as a platform is on its
way out due to platforms such as Windows and Linux? Please share
your perspective?
When compared with other platforms, Unix is a much more
credible, scalable and reliable platform. Only AIX running on IBM
systems designed with power architecture technology can scale up to
256 cores and 1,024 threads and get virtualization with it. Thus it
depends on the customer whether they want to look at low cost price
solution and instead pay a heavy price by running their data centre
on an insecure and non-scalable OS.
In the emerging world of clouds, what role can a
platform like AIX play?
The features that are available only in AIX allow clients to
have fewer operating system images (kernels) on their Power
servers. While hypervisor-based logical partitioning helps
consolidate and virtualize hardware within a box. It is
operating system virtualization that really allows for a more
granular, flexible approach to systems and workload management. The
end result is a much more efficient use of resources. At the same
time, it provides IT with the ability to react much more quickly to
the needs of the business by being able to deploy new workloads
quickly.
How has AIX performed in India?
According to a recent operating system report by Gartner, IBM's
AIX operating system revenue grew 9.2 percent in 2010. In India we
have customers across verticals. Some of our customers in India
include Cosmos Bank, Ester Industries, Sterling Commerce. We have
recently announced Gulf Oil as our customers using IBM P700 Blade
Server on the AiX 6.1 platform.
What can we expect for the future?
AIX has come a long way from the initial version for the RT.
With the introduction of Power7, virtualization and editions, it is
now possible to have very granular systems and LPARs that range
from blades, small 2U form factors all the way up to the 256 core
Power 795 servers. We would keep on innovating AIX and work on the
Power8 is already underway.