IBM AIX -

Earth[Tera].bin · 12 Aug 2009 at 14:48

Received an email from one of my past lecturers , asking me if I would be interested in an IBM AIX course that's starting soon. The course covers AIX administration and logical partitioning and virtualisation.

I'm tempted to say yes , particularly as I'm still unemployed after graduating this year. However I don't really want to waste money on a course that wont prove useful, so my general question is if those working in the I.T sector see the AIX course as particularly useful.

Cheers in advance.

craptakular · 12 Aug 2009 at 15:20

I can't comment on the course but furthering your knowledge by doing additional courses can't be bad. It will look a lot better on the CV if you do more training rather than just stating "unemployed".

As I say I dunno about the merits of that particular course but someone else will!

Earth[Tera].bin · 12 Aug 2009 at 15:27

Yeah that's very true Oxy. Unfortunately though course fees are going to be a deciding factor so I need to weigh up whether the skills are worth the financial stress is might place on me.

daz.rathbone · 12 Aug 2009 at 15:41

Always useful to have the basics courses in as many flavours of UNIX as possible - takes away some of the limits for roles you can apply for (i.e specific Solaris/AIX/HP-UX roles)

Also any coverage of virtualisation/partitioning is very good, either LPAR/VPAR/Containers etc

slylittlefox · 12 Aug 2009 at 16:09

AIX is used in a lot of banking systems - and there be money there

If you can afford it, go for it

memyselfandi · 12 Aug 2009 at 18:14

If it's covering LPARs and PowerVM I would suggest going on the course if at all possible. These sorts of technology are still in demand and more and more virtualisation is being used by the customers I deal with.

I know I will be asking my management to send me on a course covering those things within the next 6-12 months.

BigglesPiP · 12 Aug 2009 at 19:30

Yes, the banks all use AIX, as the ATM's use IBM CICS, which uses IBM DB2.

You also see it running various bits of custom server software that were written to use DB2 for their backend databases.

Can be run on some pretty beefy wardrobes, 64 5GHz IBM p6000 cores is a lot of FLOPS.

Rwac · 12 Aug 2009 at 19:33

It may be only beneficial if you can get straight to using the knowledge gained in real world situations.

Maybe try and get a unpaid work placement (1 month?) somewhere that uses AIX afterwards?

BigglesPiP · 12 Aug 2009 at 19:36

Rwac said:
It may be only beneficial if you can get straight to using the knowledge gained in real world situations.

Maybe try and get a unpaid work placement (1 month?) somewhere that uses AIX afterwards?

Grab an old RS/6000 off the bay and install 5.3 or 6.0, then try to accomplish real world tasks with it. Maybe even mess with the visualization and install a a PPC release of your favorite Linux distro onto an LPAR, then you can learn AIX and have the box do useful stuff for you.

Oh, and this is totally in the wrong forum, AIX is not Open Source.

Earth[Tera].bin · 12 Aug 2009 at 20:35

Cheers for the replies guys, I'm waiting a reply from my lecturer on the module details before I make a decision.

Always like tinkering so I may just take your advice and source a cheap RS/6000.