AIX: The Last Standing Commercial Unix

February 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Nearly six decades ago, a bunch of researchers at AT&T Bell Labs, MIT, and General Electric started work on a new multi-user operating system for General Electric mainframes called Multiplexed Information and Computing Service, or MULTICS. After four years of work, the project was mothballed, but was reborning when Ken Thompson, a researcher at Bell Labs, created a single-user operating system based on the ideas behind MULTICS to run on a PDP-7 that Ma Bell had laying around.

And thus UNICS – and what would eventually become Unix and the whole open systems revolution – was born. With Unix came the C programming language, and eventually not only portability of an operating system across multiple and previously incompatible hardware systems, but the very idea that systems should be designed with a common API stack that allows such portability in the first place. Eventually Unix systems went commercial, and Unix Wars waged in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, seeing the rise of Sun Microsystems and its Solaris, Hewlett-Packard and its HP/UX, Digital Equipment with its Tru64, various flavors of open source BSD Unix, SCO Unix and Novell UnixWare for X86 machinery, and of course, IBM’s own AIX.

If I came back in a time machine to February 1990 and told you that IBM’s AIX would be the last remaining commercial Unix in the datacenter – yes, Apple’s popular and certainly commercial MacOS is underpinned by FreeBSD and is commercial, but Apple stopped selling servers a long time ago – you would have called me crazy and had me committed. AIX was a kind of hybrid between the BSD and Unix System V variants, and the main reason it is still around is that IBM is still committed to its own Power-based servers and so are customers who still need big iron to run big databases and applications that sit atop them.

That, by and large, is what AIX still does – and does well – today, and it only does so because it generates enough money for Big Blue to justify continuing investment in processor, system, and operating system design. And were it not for the additional revenues and profits from IBM i and Linux businesses on Power, which are also largely driven by OLTP systems, the numbers might not work out. It takes all three to make this work. Fortunately, IBM has a growing SAP HANA business on Linux on Power and a large and stable base of IBM i on Power customers in addition to the steady AIX base. Our best guess is that AIX drives about 50 percent of Power Systems revenues, with Linux making up another 20 percent and IBM i making up the remaining 30 percent or so. The sales of IBM i machines make up the bulk of IBM’s volumes, and somewhere around three quarters of its overall base of unique customers.

So when there is a kerfuffle that calls into question IBM’s investment in AIX – remember, whatever makes Power Systems strong makes IBM i last longer – it gets our attention.

IBM has not had formal layoffs since late 2014 and early 2015, and has been particularly sensitive about the issue of layoffs since it had to cut its employee base nearly in half when it very badly misjudged its business in the wake of the recession that started cooking after the 1987 stock market crash and really got rolling in 1989 and contributed to Big Blue’s self-described “near death experience” in the early 1990s. IBM went from nearly 400,000 in 1990 to about 220,000 in 1994 and booked well north of $10 billion in restructuring charges. The late part of a year or the early part of the next year is the time likes to do “workload rebalancing” and “resource actions,” which are what you and I would call a layoff. But there is usually a twist in there, and sometimes IBM eliminates positions or moves them to new geographies. Big Blue doesn’t like to talk about it, but we reckon this is often to cut costs, and we think it is not a coincidence that over the years a lot of IBM i development has moved from Toronto, Ontario and Rochester, Minnesota to Beijing in China, and similarly over the years a lot of AIX development has moved to India. (We are not sure where, but IBM’s India operations are headquartered in Bangalore.)

A month ago, a report surfaced that 80 people involved in AIX development had been shifted from the United States to India as 2022 came to a close, and claimed that about half of the development for AIX was split between the United States and India before that. The report went on to say that the 80 people working on AIX were “redeployed,” meaning that they were given the opportunity to find new jobs at IBM if they did not want to join the AIX team in India.

Mark Figley, vice president of IBM Power development, which means he is in charge of all operating system development on Power – that’s IBM i, AIX, and Linux – reached out to us to clarify the situation and put the kibosh in the idea that IBM was not investing in AIX. Figley confirmed that around 80 AIX development positions formerly in the United States had been relocated to India., but characterized this as an effort to consolidate the AIX development team all in one place, and said further that around two-thirds of the AIX development team was already in India and this would push it to all but a core set of technical support and executive leadership people.

By our math, that means that AIX development and tech support is being handled by somewhere around 350 people. That might seem small, but AIX is mature, Unix is not changing as fast as it was decades ago and indeed no operating systems are changing all that much. A lot of the activity is higher up in the stack. Updates to the operating system involve security, the addition of open source components, support for new processors and features, and the like.

Moreover, nearly all of the people formerly on the AIX team have been retained by the Power Systems organization, according to Figley.

“I need to be very clear about a couple of things,” Figley tells The Four Hundred. “For the team members that were part of the AIX team in the United States, when we decided to consolidate this mission and centralize it for better collaboration for the team, 100 percent of the people that now are finding new roles, we had a new role identified for them in Power Systems on the day that we announced this. So those people are not gone, those people are still contributing to the Power mission. They are all in new roles, they are helping move Power forward into the next generation. And so if we have a key client who’s down in production, the guy who wrote that component 20 years ago still works for us, we can still reach out to him and get his help to get make sure that we understand the context. And so that this is not those people then departed IBM and are no longer with us. These people didn’t even depart Power Systems. They are still developing. They’re still part of my team. A few of them went to other peer executive teams, but most of them are still reporting to me.”

In a sense, this is a net increase in investment in AIX.

The thing that IBM really wants everyone to understand is that the AIX roadmap has not changed one bit after all of these personnel changes.

IBM delivers an AIX Technology Level update every year or so, and there is one on the slate for later this year in fact. And AIX 7.3 will be supported at least through the end of 2038 in some fashion, with full marketing and active support extending out in 2033. That us a dozen years of active support for the current release. AIX 7.4 is slated for sometime in early 2025, which is when we expect Power11 chips.

IBM doesn’t have to do a lot but stick to its Power chips and AIX knitting to keep customers happy and buying Power10 and Power11 systems. And as far as I can tell, that is indeed the plan.

The one thing that IBM is not going to do, by the way, is take all of the reliability and scalability goodies in AIX and put them into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. That would kill the differentiation that AIX offers, and the premium that IBM can charge for AIX products in a world that has not a single other Unix competitor left alive.

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