In today’s always-on enterprise landscape, zero planned downtime is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity. Companies in every sector from finance, healthcare to telecom simply can’t afford downtime. Critical systems must stay available, even when they are being updated. That’s where AIX Live Update stands apart. As an industry-leading solution, AIX Live Update enables businesses to apply kernel-level updates even across major OS releases without rebooting or disrupting running workloads.

For AIX Live Update, two key parameters matter the most to the customers – Blackout time and Total Update Time. Blackout time is the brief period during which the applications are paused and should be within the tolerance level to prevent application disruption. The total time refers to the full duration of the live update operation, during which additional system resources on the server in use.

Recent enhancements to AIX Live Update have significantly reduced both blackout time and overall update duration, further improving its suitability for mission-critical workloads. This blog explores these enhancements to highlight the performance improvements seen with our internal customer like workload.

To evaluate these enhancements, we tested AIX Live Update using our in-house Oracle OLTP workload created in collaboration with customer – a representative scenario for high-throughput, latency-sensitive enterprise grade environments. The table summarizes the significant improvements seen

These enhancements to AIX Live Update deliver meaningful performance improvements which are critical for latency-sensitive, high-throughput workloads. They reinforce the value of Live Update in real-world customer environments where uptime and efficiency are critical. We will continue to build on these improvements to further enhance zero-downtime capabilities.