Do you think that the AIX operating system is no longer relevant in this era of the private cloud? If so, you may want to reconsider that point of view. The cost efficiency of the public cloud is certainly changing the landscape in profound ways, and the traditional constructs of on-premises IT need to make room for these changes. In parallel, IBM AIX continues to evolve in the cloud and hyper-converged ecosystem.
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) can deliver a public cloud-like experience from within enterprise data centres, and HCI solutions are designed to accelerate the deployment of new resources and increase agility while also helping reduce costs, risks and complexity. Organizations have been adopting HCI solutions to run a wide range of enterprise applications—from NoSQL databases and analytics applications to productivity, unified communications and other applications—all in a single environment.
Until recently, HCI solutions have tended to focus heavily on consolidating Linux and Windows environments. The latest update to IBM Hyperconverged Systems powered by Nutanix, however, is changing that focus. Now your organization can bring the benefits of HCI to your AIX environment—or AIX to your HCI environment. The update enables you to run applications on AIX 7.2 virtualized on a Nutanix enterprise private cloud. This solution is the first one available in the marketplace that supports AIX applications in an HCI environment.
Selecting prime AIX candidates for HCI
Many organizations are eager to simplify their infrastructures, and consolidating AIX workloads on an HCI system is a great solution. Application server environments such as IBM WebSphere Application Server and other custom applications are prime candidates for this move. Companies having distributed compute environments with heterogeneous workloads on AIX, Linux or Windows are also seeing the opportunity a consolidated HCI offers in terms of simplicity for areas in which deep IT skills aren’t available. You can capitalize on important opportunities to reduce the cost of complexity by 60 per cent in five years by moving these applications from traditional infrastructure to HCI.
DevOps environments present another key use case for AIX on HCI. An HCI solution empowers you to quickly spin up and provision an AIX virtual machine for a developer. WebSphere Application Server and databases like IBM Db2 are also good candidates for HCI—and can reduce the need for disparate infrastructures.
Whichever use cases you choose, migrating AIX workloads to HCI helps you to simplify IT management while modernizing both your infrastructure and your delivery of resources.
Simplifying management and reducing costs
IBM Hyperconverged Systems powered by Nutanix is designed to let you streamline IT administration. The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform software, a virtualized scale-out cloud environment, serves as an abstraction layer that creates a single, easy-to-manage private cloud. You can manage hundreds of applications—whether they are running on Linux or AIX—all from a single pane of glass. The AIX environment is managed through Prism, just like other virtual machine guests.
Consolidating workloads helps your organization cut costs. You can run Linux and AIX workloads on the same IBM Power Systems infrastructure, and you can efficiently manage both POWER and x86- architecture-based hyperconverged systems in that single Prism environment. As a result, you can significantly reduce the cost of operations associated with acquiring, operating and managing those previously disparate environments.
Modernizing infrastructure and delivery
By moving AIX and Linux workloads to IBM Hyperconverged Systems powered by Nutanix, you can modernize your infrastructure. Make the most of your scale-out, data-intensive database and analytics workloads by taking advantage of the performance, reliability, flexibility and security of the latest IBM Power Systems servers. At the same time, you can modernize how you deliver IT. Creating a public cloud–like environment can allow you to provide compute and storage resources 50 per cent faster, easier and much more efficiently than with traditional infrastructure1.
[Credit] IDC White Paper, sponsored by Nutanix, “Nutanix Delivering Strong Value as a Cost-Effective, Efficient, Scalable Platform for Enterprise Applications”, August 2017