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Better hot-patches, more virty in Big Blue's next AIX

And you thought big Unix was dead! Well it ain't. And it wants upgrading inside a year

As well as the range of Linux servers it released last week, Big Blue also announced version 7.2 of its venerable AIX operating system.

Still a heavy-hitter in the world of big enterprise workloads, AIX is part of that declining population of Unix-based rather than Linux-based operating systems.

Customers have a fair whack of prep time in front of them, since AIX 6.1 Enterprise Edition doesn't hit end-of-support until April 2017 (and curiously, AIX 7.1 Enterprise breathes its last sooner, in September 2016).

Key features Big Blue trumpets in AIX 7.2 include a live update that can run everything up to and including live kernel updates without rebooting a running system. An interim fix mechanism replaces AIX Hotpatch, again to get rid of reboots.

The OS includes a second-generation virtual network interface card (VNIC), which gives AIX LPAR virtual machines direct access to single-root input-output virtualisation (SRIOV) resources and cuts down on data copying.

Oracle's RDSv3 protocol is now supported over Mellanox adapters with RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) for higher clustering performance.

AIX 7.2 also wraps up IBM Power SC standard edition v1.1, PowerVC standard edition v1.1, Cloud Manager with OpenStack 4.3, BigFix Lifecycle, IBM Tivoli Monitoring and Mozilla Firefox.

These were also added to AIX 7.1, which also gets Dynamic System Optimizer v1.1.

The AIX 7.2 announcement is here. ®

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