HPUX vs AIX

[R Madhavan]

Any body has done evaluation on good & bad about these two OS.? Any pointers to find some info. on comparison..? how about people saying AIX not true 64bit...?

thanks for any valuable input...

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

AIX isn't even true 32 bit..
a strange thing about 31..

Later,
Bill

[Duncan Edmonstone]

If you ask me, the thing about AIX is that you can tell it was developed by a bunch of programmers who grew up working on mainframes! This has its good and bad points, such as:

-The admin tool in AIX (SMIT) is excellent, and you can pretty much administer the whole system from it if you like, without ever seeing the command line.
-The kernel is almost completely dynamic in terms of resources (less re-compiling/reboots)
-The Volume Manager and file system tools are both excellent, and easy to pick up if you know HP-UX LVM (HP-UX LVM was originally the same code stream)
-Reliability-wise the AIX appears to be absolutely rock-solid (at least as good as HPUX)

BUT:

-The OS can't make its mind up about how to store config data - some config data lives in text files (like other UNIX OS), some lives in an object database - sometimes whats in the object database also updates whats in the text files sometimes not, sometimes its vice-versa!
-When data is in a text file, more often than not it uses the mainframe style of text formatting (stanzas) rather than keeping all the info on one line. This takes a bit of getting used to when processing through shell scripts etc. Most of the text formatting tools on AIX do have an option to handle this, but its a drag anyway...
-What looks like a standard System V or BSD implementation of a UNIX function often turns out to be implemented in a completely different fashion (such as the print spooler)

Anyway, just my $0.02 worth...

HTH

Duncan

[Patrick Chim]

Hi,

Below are some good links for your topic !

http://www.osdata.com/
http://www.unixguide.net/unixguide.shtml

Patrick

[Thierry Poels_1]

HPUX = good
AIX = bad

hmm, just kidding, have a look at http://www.osdata.com/ for some info about both.

regards,
Thierry.

[R Madhavan]

Bill, appreciate, if you can explain further on your comments..
thanks,

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

I can't find my original link on the 31 bit kernel.. it had something to do with parity..
in any case..

about AIX 5L, only around 14 applications show some sort of 64-bit (http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/aix/aixisv.html)
but Oracle and SAP aren't part of that.

AIX is still not a true 64-bit OS since the kernel is a hybrid 32-bit/64-bit, this means that 64-bit application performance is compromised. IBM argues that the hybrid offers the ability to use older device drivers and a single kernel. However, this argument will not hold water as more and more applications are written to take advantage of 64-bit OS

IBM btw have dropped Itanium.

I do prefer the IBM stuff to SUN, but find that they are quite expensive in comparision to hp and sun.

Later,
Bill

[Victor BERRIDGE]

Hi,
I agree with Bill as far as 32/64 bit OS goes, I just had last week an argument with IBM folk on the subject where I thought a 6Pseries 6H1 we just installed was a true 64bit OS (It could at that price...) Ive been told the only true 64 bit is the aix5L although the 6H1 has RS64 IV processors...
It is true that aix lvm/JFS WAS superior to HP but that was some time ago...
until aix 4.3.3 you coulnt import by NFS (NFS2...) properly on an aix - Well you get used to the idea and export from aix to to other platforms...
Yes as mentionned, smit is superior to sam BUT smit is not always coherent (depends on the team of developeed the diverses modules specially under X...) so I always use smitty...
You can administer an AIX just with smit, but when your ODM is corrupted...
aix is not as reliable as HP or SUN when it comes to network (my opinion...)
I managed 2 years ago on an SP to loose 90 GB of data by having disks writes faster than can JFSlog could deal with...
The worst isnt the aix, but the support in Europe, French speaking zone for sure, the rest I havent tested and dont speak german...
If having to choose between aix or HP I would look at the support quality, will it be network sensitive, do you want to be able to optimize the OS easily (HP) or an guarantied average performance is enough (IBM since it can dynamicaly change its params...),both have pro and cons, are build with true administration tools (not the case of SUN, where you must be unix guru first...)

My 2 cents

All the best
Victor

[Craig Rants]

Having worked with both O/Ss for quite a while I do have my preferences about both.

AIX -
The SMIT tool is by far and away the best management tool on any Unix O/S, one of the best things I liked about it was the ability to go throught the SMIT menu and before you executed something hit the F6 key and you would see what the command line would look like. That made scripting complex things very easy. Also you could do a lot of kernel work without rebooting all the time. As far as LVM, they work it a little different but for the most part it is the same. However, functions like OnlineJFS and MirrorDisk/UX in HP are standard in AIX, ofcourse you pay more for their stuff, but software management is much easier. Also since it is part of the O/S standard, the SMIT tool has all those functions built-in. Also IBM in general is ahead of HP in terms of R&D for new technologies. AIX is a little wierd also because it really is not BSD or System V, they like to say they can work both ways. As far as hardware goes, the only problem I ever has was with their SSA drives, kinda of like a "Hot Swap Smart Enclosure" in HP terms. The drives on there did not seem to last real long, maybe about a year and you could expect a failure. Just my experience however.

HP -
Now that I have put AIX on a pedistal. HP has way more software developed for it, you could not go out and find an AIX porting site! This tends to make your HP more functional, or at least give you some options when you design your system. Also HP seems to have more partnerships with other companies so you can use more third party solutions with your HP. AIX is more like Apple, a lot more proprietary, of course that is just my experience. HPUX is also geared to do more things, just look at the product lines. HP has workstations to the superdome, if you have a need the can probably meet it, whereas AIX is geared for large backend apps and they are just now making a push at "e" stuff.

So what is my verdict, they are both good O/Ss, it depends on what you need. They both have their place in the Unix market, as does Sun. A little competition is a good thing, think Microsoft.

C

[Krishna Prasad]

The last time I had an AIX box it didn't use a system 5 standard.

I had more hardware failures on one AIX box then I did for 15 HP Servers.

Also, IBM is trying to move there OS to Linux which tells me they don't really think AIX is all that.

[Krishna Prasad]

I forgot to mention that AIX also limits you to 10 shared memory segements where HP is unlimited. ( At least the last AIX box I had about 3 years ago. )

If you have a application that requires more then 10 ( Like SAP ) this can be an issues.
There are ways to make it work with 10 but it much easier with HP.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Post the same question in any AIX forum and check the answers.

:-)

-Sri

[Darrell Allen]

Just as in anything else, there are AIX bigots and HP bigots. Personally, AIX is less like UNIX. The whole object database thing used to be pretty bad. I had a number of times it got confused when I had disks replaced. That was on older versions though and I believe (from former co-workers) it's better now. I agree with Craig, SMIT is much better than SAM. I'm also partial to HP support. Nothing bad about IBM support but I just had better experiences with HP.

I had experience with AIX before I did with HPUX and I had very little trouble switching to HPUX. The main differences I believe are at the sysadmin level but I believe that's true with any flavor of UNIX. I don't believe the user will notice much difference.

All said, I like AIX and HPUX and am comfortable with both (not to mention Solaris). I believe either is a good choice.

Darrell

[T G Manikandan]

Hello,
AIX has a feature where you can extend any filesystem online(even your root file system)
using the Extended Journaled file system.

HPUX -The root,stand file system is a HFS one.
YOu cannot extend it without re-installing or using the ignite UX.

[John Payne_2]

Nobody said anything about documentation...

Ever try to find something in the Redbooks?

HP is alot more forthcoming with the docs/whitepapers/tech fixes/itrc/forums....