AIX vs Linux

Hi, what benefits are there in using AIX? Is it free?

AIX is not free, but 'enterprise' Linux is not either, AIX is a great UNIX when You are looking for 'five nines' which means 99.999% availability, with their PowerHA/HACMP, Linux also has its cluster stack, but its nowhere near the AIX.

Linux may be good for some less important tasks and for 'not so casual' desktop while AIX is for 'heavy duty'.

AIX only runs on IBM machines.

AIX has a complete set of enterprise utilities, including an effective disaster recovery "backup to removable media and restore from bare iron" solution at no extra cost.

Many things that Linux developers take for granted as free or included cost extra from IBM, or are more difficult to install/manage.

If you can add some detail about what prompts the question, I bet you will get some useful advise on how to select one over the other.

From the POV of an average user/programmer AIX is something like a reduced linux: missing commands, missing options, lesser flexibility, hard-to-use shell. Of course you can use GNU products that improve things... The system itself is reliable, I have computers that have been working for years non-stop (I do have a few cross-linked files, though).

Enterprise Linux are wanna-be UNIX at low cost and robust code base.

As a Storage Tester. I feel my life far more comfortable in AIX though...

AIX is a great platform for enterprise from the POV of a SysAdmin. It's not free, but it is a case of getting what you pay for in many ways. Prices are getting on par with Windows and Linux once you start looking at Power7 and you actually leverage virtualization and tuning. Of course, data centers still charge more to host on AIX boxes so Linux is probably a better cost option if you contract for hosted data center space. If you have to ask whether an OS is free, then AIX is probably not a good option to consider. Some benefits include mksysb backups (especially when you leverage NIM, mksysb-iso files for DR, and editable image.data files), a robust virtualized environment, widespread support and optimization for software tuned to run on it (SAP, CATIA, Oracle, etc...), excellent scalability, reduced package management overhead, live partition mobility, great TSM integration for Node and DB backups, great tie ins to SAN fabric/solutions from IBM and others, and of course... you get to use smitty. It's probably overkill for something like a CUPS, DNS or sendmail server. It's just the thing for larger deployments of enterprise software.