[geeks] Shoot, I forgot about the AIX section

[Chris Byrne]

Doh, I forgot to include the AIX secion

AIX: UNIX for IBM people. A lot of UNIX people get down on AIX because so
much of it is propietary weirdness rather than straight standard UNIX. For
example manually editing most of the standard configuration files (if they
even exist) is a good way to hose your system, and in a normal UNIX that's a
way of life, i.e. everything is a file, and all files should be readable.

But AIX is perfect for IBM's customers. It alreayd fits their computing
world view so to speak, and the management tools fit right in. So you as a
Solaris use might hate AIX, but to someone who's spent their computing life
on OS/390 and AS/400, AIX is great.

And AIX runs on some kick butt hardware. Other than the RIDICULOUS prices,
RS/6000's are excellent machines. The really big boys much of the I/O
capacity and segmentation/paralellization that Mainframes have, but they run
UNIX, which makeds us all very very happy. And even the little guys are
pretty cool, if as I said, you can get around the FRIKKIN RIDICULOUS prices
(Single PPC604e 375mhz 128mb, 9gig, 2D graphics is 11k).

Finally, there are very few hardware/software combos that can match the
database performance of an RS/6000-S80 running DB2. My aunt Allison is a
senior DBA for CSC, has been for 10 years, and works on jsut about every
database there is, so I trust her opinion on this one. I have never seen
another UNIX combo that can handle that many transactions, with that large a
databse, that quickly, and she seconds that opinion. I mean if an S80 can
handle the load of being the rootserver for NSI, It's got to be good.

Ok good stuff aside, AIX is weird. You pretty much have to use smit unless
you are looking for trouble. It's fairly heavyweight, but not as much as say
Win2K. There are lots of apps available but a lot of them are from IBM or
CA, which means $$$ and in the case of CA support nightmares. The hardware
is FRIKKEN EXPENSIVE (have I said that oo much), and nothing else runs on
it.

Thats about it

Chris Byrne