AIX

35 Years of Innovation

By Prenessa Lowery posted Tue February 23, 2021 06:00 AM

  

Celebrating 35 Years of Innovation
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This February marks the 35th anniversary of IBM AIX! For over three decades, AIX has been the cornerstone of mission-critical computing for enterprise organizations in highly complex industries while evolving to introduce a wealth of new hybrid cloud and opensource capabilities.

As we enter a new era, AIX will continue to support the emerging technologies our clients future work depends on. And with new technology comes new growth for the platform. Coming to your datacenter in 4Q2021, AIX 7.3 will continue a 35-year tradition of innovation with enhanced capabilities that deliver resiliency, security, and scale needed to get your IT environment hybrid cloud ready!
  • Continuous Computing
    • Enhanced performance for dynamic compute or memory management.
  • Scalability
    • Designed for increased levels of compute and larger data storage capacities.
  • Security
    • Additional enhancements to ensure data is protected both in flight and at rest.
  • Hybrid Cloud
    • Out-of-the-box ready for automation at scale with Ansible solutions.

Join the anniversary Celebration!

Throughout the year, you will have the opportunity to hear from IBM executives, SME’s, AIX influencers, AIX customers and more as they share their AIX story!  Also, you will get a chance to gain more insights on how AIX will prepare clients for the future.

To stay updated and learn more about AIX 7.3, please visit IBM AIX!

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Christian Sonnemans
Sat March 27, 2021 05:20 AM

Started with AIX version 3.1 on several IBM machines, and if I can remember it one of the first machines was an IBM 350 and the bigger one 550 (mca machines). And indeed a lot changed, now working with IBM P9 machines, always loved the Power environment for its robust and stable platform. And not to forget the great support from the IBM people!

Philippe Hermes
Wed March 17, 2021 01:37 PM

I started AIX and POWER in 1992. My first project was done with AIX 3.2.5 on 7011-220 workstation. Since it was  many projects with SP2 (IBM Scalable POWERparallel). Then POWER4, 5, 6, 7, b8 now 9.  It is now long time ago however AIX still the best OS I ever seen and used. A robust OS with a robust platform too for the workloads of all our customers, and what a great teams and persons over the world.

Michael Abel
Thu March 11, 2021 06:36 AM

Started with AIX on the RT (6150?) and PS/2 feeding in a bunch of 3.5" diskettes. Had access to one of the first RS/6000 320 running AIX 3 - around early 1990 as far as I can remember. Wow - what a time and what an evolution since then. The other "UNIX*ers" made fun of IBM because of things like SMIT, LVM, SRC...  Hope (and I am almost sure) that AIX will stay around until my retirement.

Gobinath Panchavarnam
Sun March 07, 2021 12:52 AM

I started my career to use AIX 5L on POWER4/5 many years ago so am excited to be able to announce a new version of AIX this year as we celebrate 35 years of innovation!   We will continue to deliver the high-value core strengths that make AIX the best operating system for mission critical workloads, while ensuring our clients are ready for hybrid cloud.  Please join with us by sharing your AIX story as we lead up to the release later this year!

Sridhar Murthy
Sat March 06, 2021 09:48 AM

I have the pleasure and pride of working on every single version of AIX released since Version 3.2.5.

I was first introduced to AIX in 1994 while working on IBM's Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) project in Shady Grove, MD. The project involved developing a Geomap tool using X11 and Motif libraries. The development platform was AIX Interface Composer (AIC Version 3.2) on AIX Version 4.1 on the RISC6000 7013-590 system (The Refrigerator). I delivered the prototype in less than 6 weeks and those of you who remember how difficult it was to develop a GUI using X11/Motif libraries can truly appreciate the quickness with which I was able to deliver the prototype.

In 1995, I got the opportunity to serve on a delivery team integrating middleware on AIX 3.2.5 and Open Source Foundation DCE/DFS platform for USDA Forest Service. Rodney Burnett was one of the lead architects for that solution. It was truly distributed in nature because the DCE cells were built around the country (in all 50 states) and the solution served close to 50,000 users throughout the agency.

Last month I built an OpenShift cluster on a Power8 system (8286-42A) for a LAMP architecture demo using WebSphere, Apache and MySQL container images.  I was lucky to get a wonderful opportunity to use a Power E980 system while working on the the IBM Redbook IBM Power Systems Private Cloud with Shared Utility  Capacity: Featuring Power Enterprise Pools 2.0. AIX on IBM Power Systems is the gold standard when it comes to computing platform.

AIX has introduced so many "first of a kind" technologies to the UNIX world and in my opinion the most important one was introducing Journaling File System which exploited the capabilities of "Reliability Engineering".

Long live AIX !!!

Hugo Blanco
Thu February 25, 2021 02:52 PM

Some feedback from Spain.. in Spanish :)

Comencé mi carrera como instructor de AIX hace ya más de 12 años. Tiempo después crearía mi empresa, SiXE en la actualidad partner de IBM. Nunca pensé que esta tecnología tuviera futuro tantos años después, ni que sobreviviera a la muerte de Solaris y HP-UX. Me encanta poderlo seguir recomendando a mis clientes en todo el mundo y que sepan, que sus entornos críticos tienen el sistema operativo y el hardware no solo más potente, sino más estable. Que lo que aprendieron hace 20 años, sigue funcionando y que si hay algún problema, siempre existe una manera de solucionarlo sin poner en peligro ni sus aplicaciones, ni sus datos. Me alegra mucho que todo este esfuerzo de ingeniería siga hacia adelante por mucho tiempo más.

Alexandre Kazuo Sato
Wed February 24, 2021 05:05 PM

I started on IT mission-critical servers support with AIX in 1998, working with version 4 family (4.1.5, 4.2 and 4.3.3) and since them, I understood the importance of a robust baseline, tailored for the given hardware to deliver performance, reliability and cost-effectiveness. And AIX represents this baseline for UNIX-based systems and IBM's commitment to provide the best for its customers. Live long for AIX!

Cesar Daniel Delgado Ponce
Wed February 24, 2021 10:29 AM

I have been working with AIX since 1997 (in fact i remember been working with a AIX 3.1 server) so welcome another version of AIX. Let's hope there will be some improvements in ACL inheritance.

Maria Ward
Wed February 24, 2021 09:15 AM

I started my career at IBM bringing up AIX 5L on POWER4 many years ago so am excited to be able to announce a new version of AIX this year as we celebrate 35 years of innovation!   We will continue to deliver the high-value core strengths that make AIX the best operating system for mission critical workloads, while ensuring our clients are ready for hybrid cloud.  Please join me by sharing your AIX story as we lead up to the release later this year!

Rodney Burnett
Tue February 23, 2021 03:09 PM

As an IBMer working around AIX for over 30 years, it's been great to see AIX evolve from a uniprocessor workstation OS to a highly robust and scalable operating system that runs some of the most demanding workloads in the industry.

I spent my first day at IBM installing AIX version 2 onto an IBM PC RT using a stack of 5.25" floppy disks. Things have changed a lot since then.