IBM is now offering a new, lower-priced edition of AIX designed for SMB environments or smaller workloads consolidated on midrange or high-end Power Systems. The new edition, AIX 6 Express Edition, supports up to four cores per image and 8GB per core, and still provides the reliability and flexibility of AIX at a lower cost, IBM notes. AIX Express joins the existing AIX Standard and Enterprise Editions to fill out the new family of AIX 6 offerings.
In addition, IBM is now delivering IBM i 7.1, an integrated operating environment designed to take advantage of workload optimization features of POWER7, including automatic exploitation of Solid State Drives for optimum performance. Enhanced support for XML in DB2, the integrated database for IBM i, helps companies exchange information between customers and suppliers, IBM explains, and a new virtualization feature for PowerVM enables simpler testing of new releases before a software upgrade. Plus, IBM has added support for asynchronous geographic mirroring with PowerHA SystemMirror for multi-site clustering over longer distances.
For Developers
IBM Rational Developer for Power V7.6 now gives users of Power Systems on AIX a modern, Eclipse-based development environment that supports C/C++ and COBOL development -- which is also tightly integrated with Rational Team Concert for Power Systems for improved application lifecycle management. IBM is also introducing Rational compilers for C/C++ and Fortran, both optimized for POWER7. IBM claims that this new environment can provide up to 30 percent improvement in workload productivity.