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 TEST CENTER In AIX 5L, blue suit meets tie-dye By P.J. Connolly July 20, 2001 ANYONE WHO STILL doubts that Linux has a future in the enterprise should consider IBM's attitude toward the upstart OS. If Big Blue weren't convinced of Linux's viability, would it have modified its AIX Unix platform to incorporate support for Linux applications?
It used to be that the only game in town for serious computing below the mainframe level involved one variety of Unix or another. Various factors entered into companies' decisions as to which Unix to use. Hewlett-Packard and Sun both have die-hard followers, but IBM's advantage has always been its large installed base of mainframe customers, for whom Unix boxes are strictly midrange systems. Frankly, all flavors of Unix are about the same when it comes to management tools. It hardly matters whether the user interface is presented as a command line, a set of character-based menus, or even a point-and-click X Window application -- the end result is something less than intuitive. Unix vendors had better wake up fast because an 800-pound gorilla is breathing down their necks, and he's wearing a Microsoft giveaway shirt. With the advent of Windows Datacenter Server and Intel's long-awaited Itanium processors, Microsoft is finally ready to enter the big-stakes world of 64-bit computing, and it's bringing a lot of momentum to the table. Perhaps Microsoft's biggest advantage is the large and steadily increasing number of people with hands-on experience managing Windows NT and Windows 2000 servers. The number of Unix gurus is growing glacially by comparison, and they're divided into four major factions -- AIX, HP-UX, Linux, and Solaris -- which are more divided than united by their common heritage. Incorporating Linux support into AIX does little to improve the state of Unix management malaise; it will take more than a "Linux affinity" to do that. Still, AIX 5L promises enhancements in the areas of development and customer satisfaction that may give IBM the advantage over its three major Unix competitors. By allowing companies to consider developers with strong Linux backgrounds, IBM makes it easier for customers to find developers and opens doors to a large crop of talented programmers who would not otherwise have had the opportunity to work on AIX. AIX 5L will make these developers' lives easier by incorporating Linux-compatible APIs and header files, thus allowing a degree of source compatibility. But because programmers will still have to recompile Linux applications before they'll run on AIX boxes, AIX 5L does not offer what we think of as true binary compatibility. Fortunately, the separately sold AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications makes the job of porting and enhancing a little less painful, but bundling the toolbox with the OS would have made the whole package more attractive to customers. AIX 5L is poised to catch the next wave of server technology. Although today AIX is closely identified with Power3, IBM's current RISC-based CPU family, AIX 5L will support Intel's 64-bit Itanium processors and the Power4 when those systems become available later this year or in early 2002. Some of the scalability improvements of AIX 5L Release 5.1, such as support for 32-way vs. 24-way processor configurations or the capability of addressing 256GB (formerly 96GB) of memory, weren't available in the early-adopter version (Release 5.0), which we evaluated. Still, it's clear that AIX 5L offers a lot of growing room for even the largest customers. One only need look at Big Blue's plans for AIX's JFS2 journaling file system to peg the OS as properly poised for the future. The file system today supports file sizes as large as a terabyte and is planned to scale to the petabyte range perhaps as early as the next release. Yes, Microsoft might be thumping its mighty chest, but IBM is holding and looking to expand its long-held territory. P.J. Connolly covers operating systems, networking, security, and server technologies for the Test Center. E-mail him at pj_connolly@infoworld.com.
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