Qantas Ditches Linux for AIX 360
An anonymous reader writes "Australia's No. 1 airline Qantas will shift their underlying platform running its internal finance systems from Linux to IBM's AIX next month as part of a wide-ranging technology transformation project. 'We're moving from a Linux platform to an IBM AIX environment — we did that to address some stability issues we were having', said Suzanne Young, Qantas group general manager for finance improvement and segmentation. The decision was made last year, as part of the planning for the rollout."
Bad system management? (Score:2, Insightful)
Instability can be brought up by inconsistent system management, like using different software version (either library, applications or operating systems, it doesn't matter).
If they plan to solve those issues with AIX (or any other operating system, even Windows) with no system management change, they are very likely to reproduce the very same stability issues.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
IBM business plan at work (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Hook up customers on a cheaply solution based on Linux and MySQL.
2. As customer's data and number of clients grow they will start experiencing scalability problems.
3. Propose much more scalable, reliable, dependable (and much more expensive) solution on AIX, AS/400, Mainframe.
4. Profit!
Re:IBM business plan at work (Score:5, Interesting)
You are not too far from the truth there.
We started our relationshop with IBM on their intel and Linux X series servers and as we grew they moved us to P series servers running AIX which happens to run all linux binaries just fine and even has the same command set.
The "Upgrade" path was easy and plainless and the cost was spread out over years so it kept management and the accountants happy.
Personally I see it as a winning solution for both Linux and IBM.
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There's nothing cheap about any IBM solution.. particularly the kind of solution where AIX is an option. As for the MySQL comment, they are runnign Oracle according to this article: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Qantas-w allet-takes-ICT-hit/0,130061733,339273523,00.htm [zdnet.com.au]
How many airlines these days are actually growing?
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You could be on the right lines with the IBM master plan. This in another article linked in the parent:
"In addition, Qantas was still experiencing increased infrastructure costs from an October 2005 datacentre migration, which saw its mainframe environment moved from a Sydney CBD facility to an IBM centre..."
In other words, Blue Blue's got 'em by the balls.
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you forgot one (Score:3, Interesting)
5. Profit!
IBM made their rep w/me late one night in rural Vermont. I was troubleshooting my client's sole server (an ancient AIX rig) and shit started coming up wonky (hardware!?!?). This wasn't the sort of operation that had spare parts sitting around.
Worse yet, the client had all 14 of their locations (all running dumb terminals) running through this one server and their inventory and POS systems were going to be offline in the mornin
not really news (Score:5, Funny)
Moving from one Unix to another isn't really news. Moving to Vista would be news.
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Oh, yes... that's why we have at least twice as many posts such as this one as there are posts even remotely suggesting that they should have chosen Linux.
Wait, twice as many? There were but a few posts suggesting what may have been at fault; aside from ACs like you, I've read almost nothing but neutrally-toned comments.
However, repeating a lie a thousand thousand times is bound to make it true. I'm just surprised you believed that one the first time round.
They're just fishing (Score:5, Funny)
It's worked for just about every large company that's threatened to abandon Microsoft.
The technical term... (Score:5, Funny)
Segfault? (Score:5, Funny)
Surrely, if they are having problem's with Linux stability, it must be the general manager for segmentation's fault?
Linux never crash (Score:4, Funny)
And where's the story? (Score:3, Insightful)
In the end, we have no way to determine whether this move made any sense or was FUD by IBM as some other poster implied. AIX on a cheap x86 cluster? Possibly a bad idea. AIX on their IBM mainframe? Possibly a better choice than Linux.
As much as I love Linux it's - as we all should already know - not always the best choice as it's only one of many tools that must fit the general architecture and requirements.
Sounds about right (Score:3, Interesting)
Xen is also less solid than I'd like, at least on the dual Xeon server board I'm running it on. I've had a couple of bizarre issues with Xen 3.0 now that make me wonder if I should go back (again - I tried an older 3.0 before and rolled back due to network bugs) to 2.0 .
Overall Linux is pretty damn good as a server OS, but I can certainly imagine someone finding and moving to a more stable system - though it'd probably be at the cost of ease of administration, speed of deploying services, etc.
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NFS is not really a high point of Linux. I think the protocol itself probably isn't that suitable for modern n
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I'll betcha (Score:2, Funny)
Switching OSs always fixes the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
In this day and age, if your root cause analysis comes up with "Linux is unstable" then something is screwed up with your analysis. Still this doesn't affect me, so good luck with that.
Can't say I blame them (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? Because for all the wonderful things we can do with Linux, there's one thing we can't do - we can't keep the machines from locking up. That almost never happened with Solaris, and when it DID happen Sun would figure out what went wrong and issue a patch for it within a couple of days.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. A lot. It's done many wonderful things for UNIX and the IT industry as a whole and will continue to do so. But it's not ZOMG TEH BEST OS EVAR! for every project, and I don't think Linus ever intended it to be :)
Re:Can't say I blame them (Score:5, Informative)
Since you say the machines are locking up, I'm assuming it's not an application thing. I'm talking about things that cause kernel panics or worse, here. I'm also assuming the hardware is not defective, RAM is good, etc.
Easiest things first: Whenever I find a Linux install is unstable on hardware that I haven't used before, there are a few kernel commandline options I like to try. "noapic" solves a ton of interrupt/SMP issues, "noacpi" can also help stability, and "nomce" fixes (well, ignores) a lot of bogus MCE errors-- errors that always came up on hardware that was otherwise totally stable. MCE support seems to be much more accurate with recent kernels and hardware, though. Bonus option, "nommconf" can help if a PCI device, say a Myrinet card or RAID controller, isn't seen by the kernel, even as an unknown device in lspci.
Also, since you mention Redhat, I've found situations in which last couple of RHEL4 kernels tend to crash within a few days (maxing load on 4 cores, disk, and network the whole time). I don't know if installing a non-RHEL kernel is an option for your company. If you're running RHEL3, a vanilla kernel.org kernel might be pretty painful due to some things like SELinux. On RHEL4, kernel.org kernels are very easy to install in practical terms but may not be allowed by policy. If it's an option, I've been having no problems with 2.6.19.5. That's probably rather new for a company wide deployment, but if your crashes are repeatable/testable, and that does fix it, it could at least point the way.
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Yeah I know, that's AmigaOS, right? =P
Thought it might have it's flaws as server os or in a multiuser environment
RedHat support .. (Score:3, Insightful)
What ever has the Redhat support process come to?
What was their response to your support request?
What exactly was the problem with the machines locking up?
Why the surpise? Linux IS NOT the most stable Unix (Score:5, Interesting)
But in my experience and that of many others. linux is flexible... fast.. versatile.. but the most stable it isnt.. its part of its design goal. A stable OS, has stable developement practices.. Linux's goal is not to have a stable dev practice. ( see the whole spew about bin drivers..
Why do you guys think redhat has RHEL... to stabilize linux. go to any other distrib, and well.. things change often.
Fast change does not bode well with stability. Stability comes with time.
You want fast and cheap, go linux.
You want stable, you go commercial unix ( Solaris,AiX these days)
You want a good middle ground.. you go *BSD
( yes, i'm biased, i've run extremely large bsd environments, but currently running a linux one.. and trust me, i miss my bsd )
Re:Why the surpise? Linux IS NOT the most stable U (Score:3, Informative)
AIX C compiler (Score:5, Interesting)
My first experience with AIX was auditing some large set of application C code. It was shocking, lots of uninitialized local vars, code assuming it to be 0, and it worked!
I suppouse someone at IBM decided to systematically clear stack var area at function entry... better that than to fix the broken code!.
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Different problem. The grandparent's talking about the compiler generating code that guarantees local variables are initialized to 0 on every function entry. The previous owner of that memory typically was some other function call within the same process, and there's clearly no security value in that case.
In fact, there's no security value if this is the first time the stack has grown
To me it looks slightly blind (Score:2)
Oh, yes, disregarding application quality and support.
Suddenly, you find that the method above is flaky and flimsy ? Fork out real money for real hardware, and be surprised to see it doing real work. To me, I wouldn't be surprised.
Had they asked me as a consultant, I might have suggested SUN and Solaris.
And to sack t
You mean Linus didn't invent UNIX??? (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Linux is just another flavor of UNIX.
2) it is NOT the most stable flavor of UNIX.
3) it is NOT to most feature packed flavor of UNIX.
4) it is far from being the most scaleable flavor of UNIX.
5) it does have some of the most lacking documentation I've seen since Microport UNIX.
This has NOT stopped me from using Slackware since 1994.
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Why the bickering? (Score:2)
If you're really want to help, invest time and effort in improving Linux, and stay away from flamewars :)
And so it starts (Score:5, Informative)
Linux just is NOT ready for the enterprise. Red Hat, the 'biggest' Linux company out there just hasn't learnt to run with the big dogs yet.
Technical issues about the OS aside, Red Hat just don't present as a professional company. After dealing with Sun and MS for years, dealing with RH is a bit of a joke. £300k doesn't even buy you any media! A visit to their head office in North Carolina sees the presentation done from a projector on a desk, with bits of cardboard to stop it wobbling. Trial versions of the software to keep your skills up to date ? Don't be silly - you have to use CentOS for the free tools and you're SOL for their closed source tools like Satellite or RHN Proxy.
Once you go from there to the support issues, RH take an even bigger beating. 'Just reboot it' is NOT the first (and for 3 hours, only) option I want to hear when I have a production server locked up. And 3 hours to escalate to second line is NOT good enough for a platinum contract (Premium in RH terms?). If I wanted that kind of solution and support, I'd go back to sending my cheques to Redmond.
At a technical level, Linux is NOT keeping up and is barely fit for datacentre purposes. Only recently has the LVM stuff got to a useful level where we can do multipathing (with IO on both paths) without needing third party software. It's not great yet, and the tools to maintain it are badly documented, but since we just can't get Veritas for 64bit RHEL4 (or couldn't when I checked a few months back), it's the only choice we have.
The constant changes to the API and ABI are a total PITA for ISVs. You can either go with RHEL / SLES (or CentOS if you're broke like me
Lastly, the tools. I'd really rather not get started on the issues with the tools that RH provides to manage systems. Suffice to say, not being able to do LVM setup using the text installer came as a bit of a shock. And when confronting RH on the severe deficiencies in their text-based admin tools, I was just told to spend 8k on a closed source RH product to resolve these... How much MORE like MS can you be? Yeah, we know the base product is a bit broken, but that part isn't really our focus - here, try this expensive fix.
Documentation is in a similar state with some stuff being very well documented and other stuff, poorly if at all.
In the end, Sun still have a better understanding of what the enterprise needs, both from a support and an OS point of view.
Redhat cardboard © .. (Score:2)
OK, I can see a theme emerging here in this thread. I like Linux except a) no support ) no software c) company used cardboard. This is meant to be a joke isn't it?
'Subscriptions take the pain out of purchasing software [redhat.com] because they provide everything needed in one all-inclusive price'
was: And so it starts (Score
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At the time of this visit, I'd been using Linux in businesses for about 8 years. I was trying to sell a bank on Linux, and my boss was a typical head of
Understandable? (Score:2)
However the company we worked for bought a SUSE raid pc for us. And the hardware incl. Raid 5 was not stable. I basically won't blame the kernel, but distributions for packaging and vendors for their hardware.
Some kernel modules are of course not too stable. Personally I had problems with software raid once, but somehow it's mostly hardware related in the end. The scheduling and the internals are very stable and
People forget, AIX is a complete package (Score:5, Insightful)
When you buy AIX you don't just buy an OS, you buy the hardware as well. As Apple fanboys know, it is MUCH easier to get stable software if you know exactly what kind of hardware you are going to run on.
YES it is possible to run linux on this hardware too, this is IBM after all, BUT even then you are running an OS that is designed to run on much more. AIX isn't.
Isn't linux on PC hardware stable? Nope.
And yes, I do run linux on my desktop and it is pretty damn stable, BUT I have had crashes and freezes over the last couple of years. Even one on a light server that only runs apache.
No, nothing like the famed windows crashes and forced reboots every single day BUT if you run a major company and a computer hiccups once every 3 years that still can mean a significant amount of downtime over all your machines combined.
Saying AIX is more stable then Linux is roughly like claiming a diesel truck is more reliable then a pretrol powered van. It is not really a slam against van's, just that trucks are in a different class entirely.
"Qantas ditches UNIX for UNIX" (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole POINT to open systems is that you CAN make these kinds of changes without them being disruptive. Nobody should be surprised by them.
But, Linux/Intel has done a lot for competition (Score:5, Informative)
Linux/x86 has forced IBM, Sun and HP to be competitive with much cheaper hardware and support and when pricing servers with 32GB+ of ram, there isn't much difference between Linux/x86/support and AIX/HPUX/Solaris and when you do TCO analysis, they are all very similar.
There has been a major drop in the high end *nix distributed computing environment pricing brought on by Linux, to the point where it isn't that much of a cost savings switching between Linux and HPUX/AIX/Solaris (or the other way). I don't agree that AIX is more stable than Linux, but AIX isn't that much more expensive anymore.
what were the stability issues? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Qantas's original plans called for a totally Oracle-based solution, but
that was subsequently shifted to a multi-vendor approach to better match
Qantas's specific needs, according to Young."
Astute(and correct) observations (Score:4, Informative)
Big Freaking Disclaimer, I work for IBM in support...
That being said, I use Linux as my primary desktop both at work(thank you IBM) and at home. Debian on both, though I do have to say, I just built a MythTV box and used Ubuntu(faster updates/multimedia/interface acceptable to the female counterpart) and I am VERY impressed with Fiesty Fawn 7.0.4. I have been running Linux since the pre-1.0 kernels and it has been my desktop of choice since 98 and my
Being that I work at IBM, I also have alot of experience with AIX. While personally, I hate AIX(any UNIX that cannot be administered via vi is shit in my book, take that any way you like), AIX is EXTREMELY stable, and IBM makes sure of it. I have seen the testing they do to both the hardware and software(OS level at least) and it is centered around stability/reliability first and foremost, followed closely by serviceability(tracing facilities, error reporting/recording), performance and then ease of use. Now, this order is not true of all commercial UNIXs, Solaris is used more in scientific applications/number crunching and tends to focus a bit more on performance over serviceability(surely) and possibly even stability. I have seen more Solaris machines bite it than AIX machines, but this is more likely hardware related that OS related. In either case, they are inherently more stable than Linux.
Yeah, I said it, and its true. While Linux is a WONDERFUL and EXCITING desktop OS, and makes a damn fine department server, the OS itself, and not even so much the OS, the kernel is pretty darn stable(dont believe me, boot up a Linux machine and dont do anything, it will run until something harware/power related dies). It is the surrounding libraries and applications that are not quite up to snuff. We in support see this a number of times. Here is an example:
Currently today, right now, PDKSH that is available on http://web.cs.mun.ca/~michael/pdksh/ [cs.mun.ca] is completely broken when it comes to job control. Now most of you have no clue what I mean by that, but a quick explanation is placing jobs into the background with a '&' at the end of the command line. Now programmatically, there are a number of way to do this from the shell and on PDKSH, they are completely broken. I tracked this down back in 2002 and a bug report was submitted to the developer of PDKSH. Every major Linux disribution shipped this binary in 2002, so we actually had to package and ship our own version of pdksh to make things work. Redhat later switched to AT&T's ksh, because pdksh was too broken to fix for the most part. Roll forward to 2004, we ran into a really strange problem with one of the products I support(Tivoli) and worked it for 2 months, tracing calls/checking stack traces/and general debugging and in the end, it worked right back around to this bug in pdksh. The customer had installed our pdksh, but later, had replaced it with SuSE's, which at that time was still broken. A colleague of mine finally sat down, on IBM's dime mind you, and took the time to report this bug to all the major distributions, here is the one from Debian:
http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists
This is just one package. There are a thousand stories out there that are the same. I know we regularly submit libc patches as well because we find stuff that is borked in there.
So all in all, its not really the kernel, so much as it is the rest of the building blocks that one must use within Linux. You could use your own compiler and libraries, but then are you really using
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
BASH gives you everything -- backwards compatibility with all those dusty (and perfectly serviceable) sh scripts, history support that works like csh (history functionality in csh is superior to ksh's imho), and nice things like arrays etc that you would expect to find in a regular programming language.
Wow! 138 Comments So Far... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you look a little further, you'll notice that the issue was with Financial operations. A few minutes with my good friend, google, turned up some tasty bits. For example here: http://www.fujitsu.com/global/casestudies/WWW2_ca
It says, "So when Qantas, Australia's largest airline, merged their international operation with a domestic airline and found themselves wrestling information among multiple data systems, something had to be done. The existing architecture was complex, slow, costly to operate and not very reliable. The response was IRIS, the Integrated Revenue Information Solution."
Guess what platform Fujitsu (the vendor) runs IRIS on...?
Re:obsolete? (Score:5, Informative)
I expect it will eventually be retired and replaced with Linux, but that's still years down the road. Right now, it offers some advantages, particularly on minicomputer class hardware.
Re:obsolete? (Score:5, Insightful)
In addition to that, if Qantas does not have sufficiently good application level fallback and has to rely on the hardware being rock solid, AIX is another obvious choice. You get clearly better MTB compared to a PC based server under Linux. Everything else aside you have working hardware monitoring and management which under linux is still a problem. Add to that some noises IBM is making about binary compatibility and you get a fairly compelling deal for a large company which runs a lot of custom software (which I bet was initially written for a mainframe and expects the hardware + OS to have 99.95+ year round availability).
Re:obsolete? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why it's a good idea for them. Sounds to me like they're having genuine problems, if they moved to Windows Server 2003 complete with a crowing from Microsoft Headquarters, that might be something to worry about, but I doubt IBM has anything to gain from them moving from Linux to AIX, both of which they have a substantial amount of investment in.
And no, AIX is not dead [ibm.com], not any more than BSD is anyway.
Re:obsolete? (Score:5, Insightful)
Having problems with Windows . . . you're fscked!
Freedom of choice with Windows (Score:5, Funny)
There's freedom of choice with Microsoft
If you have problems with Windows XP, you can move over to Windows Vista.
And as an added bonus, then you'll realise that things that much fscked up under Windows XP in comparison, and you'll happily move back to XP.
Obsolescence is relative (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Linux problems (Score:5, Funny)
Windows-user patient visiting Windows-OS doctor:
Doctor: Welcome to My Visit. Please note: all information contained in this visit is proprietary medical information. Am I a real doctor? Would you like to call the ADA and ensure my license is Genuine?
Patient: Uh, that's okay. I'd rather just get on to what's wrong.
Doctor: Okay. Say "Start" to begin!
Patient:
Doctor: What's that, you say? Your breath is rotten? Here's a prescription for breathmints. Is that what you needed?
Patient: No, not my breath, I said my wrist. Could you take a look at it?
[ Doctor shines light in Patient's ears. ]
Doctor: Your problem appears to be a herniated disc, but because you have red hair, I am unable to offer any treatment. Would you like me to submit a report about your hair color to the publisher of my medical texts?
Patient: Uh, no thanks.
[ Doctor runs quickly out of the room. ]
Linux-user patient visiting Linux-distribution doctor:
Doctor, skimming a textbook: This is Gray's Anatomy, 23rd Edition. Reading skeletal charts... done. Reading cardiovascular charts... done. Reading male groin chart... done. Reading female groin chart... WARNING: PATIENT DOES NOT HAVE FEMALE OPTIONS INSTALLED---CONTINUING ANYWAY. Reading blood pressure chart... rescaling... done. WARNING: YOUR LOCALE IS SET TO "IMPERIAL UNITS". METRIC UNITS WILL BE THE ONLY TYPE SUPPORTED IN THE 40TH EDITION! Done.
[ Doctor stares blankly at patient. ]
Patient:
Doctor: Ok.
Patient:
Doctor: What primary focus depth for the X-ray?
Patient: What do you mean?
[ Doctor hands patient a book on X-rays. Patient skims through for a few minutes. ]
Patient: Oh, aim for about 2cm penetration for my wrist.
[ Doctor X-rays wrist. ]
Doctor: Your X-ray has been placed in the hospital's default location. Consult with the front desk staff to change where your X-rays are stored.
Patient: Can you tell me what's wrong?
Doctor: I don't understand.
Patient: Please examine my X-ray for problems.
Doctor: Which X-ray?
Patient:
[ Doctor examines X-ray, which takes a mere fraction of a second. ]
Doctor: Ulna and Radius are properly spaced. All ligaments are intact. Capitate is cropped at the edge of the slide. Pisiform is intact. Triquetrum is intact. GRAYS_SCAPHOID_CHECK: STUB! Continuing. NOTICE: Lunate is not intact.
Patient: Does that mean I need surgery?
Doctor: Please see "Lunate HOWTO."
[ Doctor hands patient a file of papers. Patient reads through them. ]
Patient: Uhh, I think I just need a cast for two months, from what I can make of this. I guess I also need to schedule for a follow-up when it's time to remove it.
Doctor: What color would you like your cast to be? What day of the week two months from now?
Patient: White is fine. And, a Monday, preferably in the morning.
Doctor: "White" is ambiguous. Say "fine" again to get a list of possibilities. We have appointments beginning at 1300-hours Universal Coordinated Time.
Patient: Just use the first kind of "white" you have, I don't care. Umm, that would be starting at 9AM Eastern/daylight, right?
Doctor: "White, beige-white" chosen. Yes, that is 1300-hours Universal Coordinated Time.
Patient: Okay. Schedule me for 1300 then.
Doctor: Okay. Scheduled.
[ Doctor applies cast to patient. ]
Patient: Thanks. Do I pay here, or out front?
Doctor: Payment is optional. All our services are essentially free-as-in-beer but funded by contributions. More importantly, though, all of our medical treatment is free-as-in-speech. This means that you are allowed to discuss your treatment with whomever you like or take not
Re:obsolete? (Score:5, Informative)
IBM still maintains AIX. It's not reaching end of support like Tru64 or OpenVMS, and with POWER6 and POWER7 coming in the future, will likely enjoy a long, long support future.
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Lets please stress on the POWER5 part.
I have used AIX on both POWER and POWERPC based systems. It really, really sucks on POWERPC. Well, actually, the hardware sucks, and AIX just sucks as a side effect.
I remember using AIX since the good old POWER2 days (Risc/6000 320 and others). It was already rock solid on those days.
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As far as I'm concerned, IBM had better get their shit together and decide what they want. Either sell inexpensive systems and provi
Re:obsolete? (Score:5, Informative)
Besides mainframe and midrange systems, that's what you'd call "big iron".
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After that, they had a hellish time with toy PC hardware and OSs. And yup, from the point of view of customers like these, all desktop hardware and OSs are toys. They have a bunch of additional features that don't
Re:obsolete? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not at all.
They are just very stable, very mature operating systems. When you reach that level, not all change is good.
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Some things that I'd like to see Linux achieve before it's really ready for prime time:
* Achieve a mature
Re:obsolete? (Score:4, Informative)
AIX is mature, it is stable, it is well maintained, and it is not obsolete. AIX hardware and software are more much more reliable and stable than Linux and the hardware that it runs on. AIX will be supported for a very long time. Linux is very good in smaller, less demanding environments; AIX, HPUX, and Solaris are the gold standard of large enterprise level systems.
Re:Slashdot them! (Score:5, Informative)
Qantas [wikipedia.org] is one of the world's oldest Airlines, and Australia's biggest airline. It also has one, if not the best, aviation safety record of any airline, ever.
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If successful (latest news today suggests it won't be...) it would be one of the biggest takeovers in Australian history.
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Not even remotely true. There are at least a dozen airlines with better records. Qantas benefits from it's small number of flights, and as soon as there's one crash, their safety record will instantly go through the floor.
I think I'd give the honor of best safety record to Southwest, who has flown 6-7 times more flights than Qantas, while still having zero accidents.
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/rates.htm [planecrashinfo.com]
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Congratulations! Way to show your ignorance...
Those stats are based on the past 20 years of statistics, and the number of flights are so extremely, overwhelmingly in favor of the top ~5 or so airlines, that even multiple accidents wouldn't knock them out of their spots at the top. Qantas is so far down, they'd all need to have a dozen crashes for the numbers to change...
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I assume everyone understood I was referring to fatal crashes.
Nope, just one, 2 years ago. Those "fatalities" were in fact one death, in a car, not on the aircraft. Quite a tragic accident, but doesn't figure into airline crash (fatality) statistics. And further, those injuries are entirely the fault of the design of the airport, with no margin of safety between the r
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Well, by far, most accidents occur during take-off and landing, so number of "flights" isn't a bad statistic to use. If you've got a better source for accident statistics by airline, by all means, cite it.
If there's anything to learn from this thread, it should be that most people's impressions and opinions are simply baseless and wrong... I strongly suggest finding hard numbers (as to average flight length
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Southwest in nice enough to list their average flight time on their website [1], and that figure is 1.5 hours+.
Delta and Qantas have no such nice figures for public scrutiny. However (circa 2000) multiple sources say[2] Qantas has a ratio of 3150 domestic to every 540 international flights weekly, which is 17%. So (unless Australia is a MUCH larger country than I've been led to believe--or Qantas alway
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And I'm completely sure you're wrong.
Singapore Airlines/SilkAir is rated 78th in the world. Very few flights, and multiple crashes don't make for a good safety record.
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/rates.htm [planecrashinfo.com]
Re:well (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly - and that's why it makes sense for them to switch to something like AIX that actually has a "system design". Which Linux doesn't. Linux is just an OS. Any one PC may or may not work with Linux. And may or may not stop working tomorrow for any of a thousand reasons.
When an hour of downtime costs you real money, it suddenly becomes a worthwhile thing to have someone who's contractually obliged to fix your system when it breaks. Posting a bug report at freshmeat doesn't quite cut it when you have planes grounded...
Re:well (Score:5, Informative)
companies need that stability to run. I went for a job interview in Oz for a company that processes sugar cane (CRS). When they're crushing the cane to get the sugary goodness out of it, they're running several plants 24/7 for several months. Furthermore these plants are spread over about 1000 km as the crow flies (indeed they use a plane to get between plants in emergencies). In their quest for stability, they use C and Fortran ("What?" I hear some of you young critters say) on VAX to run their automated weighing machines.
No fancy
Good on Qantas. Their in-flight meals aren't too bad either (I flew over from New Zealand - the country that sells Dells in shops).
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It is pretty much the best choice for anything though, as it can quite literally do anything, and quickly too (assuming you know what you're doing). I won't consider VB6 mature until someone writes an OS kernel in it. After all, that is the ultimate test of any programming language.
Re:well (Score:5, Insightful)
> someone who's contractually obliged to fix your system when it breaks.
Many vendors, including IBM, would be happy to sell you such a contract for a Linux based system. In fact, I'd be very surprised if Qantas didn't already had such a contract for their Linux based system.
Presumably the new contract is cheaper, at least initially.
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Are we talking about system design or support contracts? You can get a support contract for Linux. You can also run other systems w/out support contracts and run in to the same issue you described.
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Support contracts provide a level of support if things go wrong. They don't stop things from going wrong in the first place; if that's happening on a regular basis, then it makes a lot of sense to replace the system.
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Show your ignorance much?
AFAIK, IBM fully supports running Linux on their hardware. I'm sure whatever contract Quantas has with IBM covers Linux so they don't have to be posting bug reports on "Freshmeat" (still can't believe you said that) when the system goes down. That said, even Linux support from IBM may not as good as running AIX which (presumably) wouldn't have had the given problems in the first place.
-matthew
Re:well (Score:5, Funny)
Re:well (Score:5, Insightful)
My take on this is one of the following:
- Linux was already supported by IBM and they figured a way of making more money (licenses + hardware)
- Someone at Quantas (perhaps lady from the article) has strong ties with someone at IBM and will earn a nice cut
- They can't fix their application / database, so they figured they'll blame it on Linux and by some time
Linux not stable? Give me a break.
Re:well (Score:5, Interesting)
Linux not stable? Give me a break.
When my second to last employer switched OS from Tru64 to Linux, we saw a massive drop in stability. This wasn't a drop in stability or reliability of our applications, but of the OS and hardware. We had been an Alpha and Tru64 shop, and before that a Vax and VMS one. When the writing was on the wall after Compaq acquired DEC and HP then acquired Compaq, we switched to Linux on HP. This was their supposedly high-end machines, complete with huge RAID cabinets with dual redundant everything. From not needing to reboot the Alphas unless we wanted to reinstall the OS, we went to having to reboot the Linux boxes every couple of days. The RAID arrays would simply stop working, but more often than that Linux would go haywire and lock up with unkillable processes chewing up the CPU's. Despite a very expensive support contract, HP couldn't fix either issue, we just came to expect a visit from the engineer to replace the RAID controllers every so often and frequent reboots. As we were selling a logistics system to run warehouses 24/7, we were not happy and started to look at Solaris on Sun hardware. I left before the switch, but unless HP have managed to solve the Linux and RAID issues I expect that they have lost a customer by now.
Re:well (Score:4, Interesting)
Now I HAVE had problems with a couple DL380 G4's and having them fall off the network occasionally (about once a month) due to some bizarre hardware / firmware issue, but only 2 machines out of about 100 have had that problem.
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- AIX, or more precisely, the Power5 (soon to be Power6) architecture has virtualization built-in the hardware, at the firmware level. Far more stable and efficient than VMWare, Xen o
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If that hour is important to you then the supplier of the hardware/OS isn't going to be of any help. Chances are that you will get a call back within 10 minutes of making a call, and some kind of support in half an hour, but solutions to a serious problem really are going to be hours away.
So the operator of the system is the person on the spot a
AIX stopped working for me (Score:3, Interesting)
I had to migrate a system from AIX to Linux once because it stopped working from one of the thousand reasons you mention.
It had a customer database in Oracle running on AIX. There was an engineering application that accessed the database and did some calculations in FORTRAN. Then, in version 8, Oracle dropped support for FORTRAN.
The AIX machine was running out of disk space and CPU power, the h
I've Found it To be Extremely Unstable (Score:2)
Of course, you can try to cut corners on the high end workstations too. If they purchase the machines without support contracts and they don't get regular main
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Seriously. I like Linux just as much as the next Slashdot zealot, but lets be real. There is a decent chance that Linux running on big IBM hardware really wasn't/isn't as stable as the standard IBM alternative. Yeah, I know IBM supports Linux on those machines, but they don't keep AIX around for nothin'.
-matthew
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Frankly, I'd agree with the GP. Both AIX and Linux are stable as rocks. Until you start playing around with 'special' and 'cool' system designs like global filesystems or exceedingly complex HA clusters, in which case I've seen both go up in flames.
As long as you have a reasonably competent vendor who cares, it's simply a question of eyeballs. If the configuration you're trying to run has been tested and debugged, well, then you're in luck. If you end
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That's Oz for ya (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That's Oz for ya (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Ewwww (Score:4, Funny)
I was under the impression that with AIX 5L, the whole point of it is you can. AIUI, the "L" stands for Linux - the big change between AIX 5 and 5L was a compatability layer so all you should need to do is recompile something written in Linux and it should just work.
Re:Ewwww (Score:4, Informative)
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Then I discovered Free and OpenBSD. It was a miracle, I could create a slim custom kernel with almost no issues. I ran this for a few more years. Though I dreaded system update days. Tar configs, install new package, reconfigure test, pray. It'd be a weekend to just to update sendma
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On AIX, every volume is an LVM-managed one. Even the root volume. The logical volume manager is more like EVMS2 than LVM. (IIRC IBM developed EVMS2, which might explain that).
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Fedora has defaulted to LVM partitioning since FC4 AFAIK.
Only the /boot partition is outside LVM control ---
"Only an active Linux system may read or write to LVM volumes. For this reason, the /boot partition that initializes your system must be held outside of the LVM physical volumes."
(FC5 Disk Partitioning Guide) [fedoraproject.org]
I use LVM on my media server, as it allows me to keep a consistent addressing format (in automatically generated playlists) as the disks get filled up. I currently have 4 disks arranged as 1 LVM volume with a total capacity of 1.3TiB [wikipedia.org].
Another plus point being that as the disks age and available disk capacities rise, I can mig
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