IBM has announced an open beta program for AIX 7, the company's open standards-based UNIX operating system. AIX 7 builds on the capabilities of previous releases of AIX and can fully exploit the performance and energy management capabilities of the new POWER7 servers that began shipping to customers earlier this year.

AIX 7 provides full binary compatibility for programs created on earlier versions of AIX including AIX 6, AIX 5, and 32-bit programs created on even earlier versions of AIX. This means that clients can protect previous investments in Power Systems by moving existing applications up to AIX 7 without having to recompile them. Full information on AIX binary compatibility is available at bm.com/power/software/aix/compatibility.

AIX 7 can fully exploit the features of systems based on POWER7 processors, and it will also be supported on systems based on earlier generations of processors including POWER6, POWER5, and POWER4. This helps customers to take advantage of many of the new features and technology in AIX 7 on their existing hardware.

Many clients running prior generations of POWER hardware would like to consolidate on newer, more efficient POWER7 servers, but simply do not have the administrative resources to upgrade a large number of servers. AIX 7 introduces new technology to help simplify consolidation of these older workloads onto new systems. Clients can back up an existing AIX 5.2 environment and restore it inside of a Workload Partition on AIX 7, which can allow them to quickly take advantage of the advances in POWER technology. 

AIX 7 and Power Systems hardware are designed to provide clients with even more performance, flexibility, security and availability than previous generations of AIX and POWER. Some of the key features of AIX 7 include:

• New support for very large workloads with up to 256 cores/1024 threads in a single AIX logical partition – four times greater than that of AIX 6
• Built-in clustering to simplify configuration and management of multiple AIX systems for high availability
• Simplified AIX configuration management for pools of AIX systems 

"The planned release of AIX 7 underscores the IBM commitment to continued UNIX innovation. IBM is designing AIX to be at the heart of systems that support smarter planet applications ranging from smart power grids to smarter traffic management. We expect that many of our clients and ISVs will participate in the AIX 7 open beta in order to be well positioned to exploit AIX 7 when it becomes generally available. Building on the success of AIX 6's open beta that helped hundreds of ISV's deliver certified applications at general availability, our AIX 7 open beta will help deliver smarter applications as well." said Jeff Howard, director of marketing for IBM Power Systems.

The beta program is open to all, and is designed to provide clients and independent software vendors (ISVs) with early access to the AIX 7 operating system. Clients and other interested parties can participate in the beta by visiting ibm.com/aix and following the links to the open beta Web page at http://www14.software.ibm.com/iwm/web/cc/earlyprograms/websphere/aix7ob/. The beta code is packaged as a DVD ISO image that beta participants can burn to physical media.

About AIX
AIX is IBM's premier open standards-based UNIX operating system. Available for more than 20 years, AIX on Power Systems servers has become the leading UNIX operating system in the world. AIX operates on the IBM Power Systems™, and BladeCenter® platforms, as well as predecessor IBM UNIX products, including the IBM System p® and IBM eServer pSeries® product lines.

For more information about IBM Power Systems, please visit: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/