What OS does the MQ Appliance use under the covers? Thanks in advance!

It doesn't matter, you can't get at it.

There is no general-purpose operating system that is exposed to the administrator or messaging user, and everything that runs on the appliance is factory-installed in the appliance firmware.

See Appliances and the appliance firmware

It's based on the DataPower hardware and firmware platform

See Implications of an Appliance

Our current distrubuted queue managers are running on AIX but we may need to move to another platform within the next few years. Other options we are looking at are Linux and MQ Appliance. Is any platform more robust than the other? We have been satisfied with running MQ on AIX for many years now.

AIX is a very robust platform. It comes from IBM so you expect that. You also get what you pay for. If you switch to commodity Linux you'll still get what you pay for - you pay less. Power Linux might be a good middle ground?

The appliance is a different model of course, you can't run your applications on it. That does make it robust because there is no user code there to mess things up! You will still need to decide where to run your applications if you choose the appliance model for your queue managers.

Hi Nate

To add to the stability of the MQ Appliance also consider the following:

• 2 Power supplies that you can plug into different sources to help prevent downtime in case one of the power supplies go down.  If the power supply itself breaks it can be plugged out and replaced without powering the appliance down (assuming the other supply is still operational)
• 3 fans to keep this beast cool.  These fans can also be individually replaced while the appliance is running
• 8 x 1Gb and 4 x 10Gb network ports to move data in and out of the box .... connect to different hubs etc for more uptime
• 2 x 1Gb admin ports to ensure you can get into the box over more than 1 network, even if the appliance is running at 100% load
• 2 x 3.2Tb SSD hard drives in a raid 1 configuration for logs and persistent messages.  These drives are built to a "not more than 5% degradation over 5 years" specification.  But, if one fails, you can plug it out and plug another one in without interrupting normal service.
• No OS that needs fixes

All in all several points to ensure the uptime of your queue managers that directly translates into less administrator time and less business lost because of downtime.

The MQ Appliance is certainly an attractive option for when we re-platform our distributed MQ off AIX. I just fear that my organization is going to force our MQ environment over to Linux. Is there a significant cost difference between Linux and the MQ Appliance? We have a relatively small environment with only a few production queue managers and a several more in test.

Hi Nate

If you compare only PVU costs with MQ appliance cost, then yes, the Appliance does look expensive.  When you do a proper ROI that also looks at downtime, administrator cost, time and effort to do fixes and upgrades, time and effort to configure failover, etc...... then it makes a very good case for the MQ appliance with typical ROI in my environment of less than 1 year.  How many PVUs do you run in production?

Thank you for your response - I appreciate your help! We are currently using around 2000 PVUs between test and production.

I think with 2000 PVUs your local IBM sales should be able to make a good case for 2 x B Appliance