Big Blue may be coy about the success or otherwise of subsuming the System i into its new Power Systems range but the AIX side of business appears to be booming.

IBM reported revenue increases for the System i's AIX-driven counterpart, the System p, for every quarter last year as well as the first quarter of 2008. Converged Power System sales, reported as up by 29%, looked more than healthy in this year's second quarter figures.

So what explains the enduring appeal of AIX? "I think the reason it’s so popular, fundamentally, is IBM’s hardware story," says Chris Scoffield, IBM specialist at Slough-headquartered major reseller Logicalis.

"The Power platform is such a strong piece of hardware and I think without that AIX wouldn’t be anywhere near as strong a proposition as it is at the moment. If you look at our competitors and the hardware offerings that they have in terms of scalability, in terms of performance, in terms of reliability; Power, it just wins hands down."

What do AIX users make of IBM's platform convergence? "I think it has been very much business as usual," says Scoffield. "I don’t think it’s been such a big issue for the System p side of the business as it was for the System i. From my understanding, there will be a lot more changes to System i so that it can use some of the technology that Power Systems brings. I'm thinking about trying to integrate with the VIO Server that we’ve had within AIX for three or four-plus years now."

In fact, says Scoffield, platform convergence has given Logicalis the opportunity to engage with System i people who would have previously dismissed IBM's brand of Unix.

"A lot of System i customers, they know that they’re getting and they’re happy with the fantastic operating system. It’s very reliable, very stable. And for that reason they possibly have sort of bad connotations about Unix. This is almost giving them a forced exposure to AIX. It is one platform now, it can run either operating system. There are no licensing constraints and there are some applications out there which for whatever reason don’t run on i any more or have never run on i. So it is an opportunity for them to look at AIX and it has been brought to the fore by this announcement."

Dual AIX/IBM i workloads are nothing new to Logicalis. Scoffield says the company has been seeing such implementations since the debut of POWER5-driven i5 servers in 2004. Typically, the "other" side of such systems run DB2 for AIX or non-i apps, notably Oracle. But given the new Power equation, what about the other way around? What about getting AIX people interested in the IBM i operating system? Scoffield sees this as "more of a challenge".

Explaining why, he says: "I think administrators are quite reluctant to look at proprietary operating systems for whatever reason; possibly quite selfishly, because they’re looking at their own career path. Within the open systems arena, I think i has probably had slightly negative connotations to it. It’s an IBM proprietary operating system and it works in a different way to a lot of the operating systems you see within open systems and, to an extent, Windows.

"So I think it’s a challenge but if there’s a business requirement then people are going to have to do it and it’s an opportunity that you can [do so] now. But I think they are very much two separate camps in terms of the administration role and getting the two to go together, where there’s not already a need, is going to be quite a challenge. I guess it is a similar challenge to where people do not have an IBM platform at all: trying to get them to adopt i from a standing start."

So is it easier to get a customer to go with an AIX Edition Power System from a standing start or an i Edition from a standing start?

"I think it’s probably easier for AIX because it’s very, very similar to a lot of other operating systems out there. There’s a commonality between all of the Unixes and the Linuxes. It’s all very similar and, to a certain extent, you can go to Windows or going back to DOS and you can see the commands aren’t the same but some of the ideas are. [They are] all command-based, command-driven operating systems.

"People are familiar with that, whereas i is a different way of thinking. You know, it is a very tight and coupled operating system with a database underneath, it’s very secure, very reliable but it is just a little bit different."