[Term of the Day]: AIX
Term of the Day
"Advanced Interactive eXecutive"
Definition — What is AIX?
AIX, the acronym of Advanced Interactive eXecutive, is a UNIX operating system developed and owned by IBM. Some Linux fans have been known to refer to it as "Ain't UNIX."
It is a very powerful and extremely stable operating system that is typically used for enterprise servers. Compared with traditional UNIX operating systems, the AIX operating system features outstanding performance, easy to use, and high scalability. It is well suited for applications that are business-critical and cannot tolerate outages.
AIX is deployed across a variety of industries such as finance, manufacturing, retail, telecommunications, healthcare, travel and government, along with many others.
IBM’s Power Systems currently supports both AIX and Linux. With the current UNIX server market capitalization estimated to be over $5 billion, a recent guide published by IBM notes that most top companies—"most" as in 80-90 percent— run their businesses on IBM Power Systems, and they experience the lowest percentage of unplanned server downtime.
These numbers make sense when you examine Power Systems usage by industry. In fact, the majority of Fortune 500 companies run their most demanding mission-critical workloads on AIX.
Consider the following statistics:
- 10 out of the world’s top 10 banks run on Power
- 10 out of the world’s top 10 telecommunication companies run on Power
- 8 out of the top 10 retailers run on Power
- 8 out of the top 10 insurers run on Power