IBM Offers Implementation and Migration Services for AIX 6.1

Published: June 26, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Installing a new operating system or migrating an old version and release to a new one is a pain for everyone--even the IT techies who are getting overtime to do the job in a several-hour window on a weekend. There are a lot of checklists they need to be gone through with a complex Unix operating system and its applications and middleware, and in a lot of midrange shops, resellers, not the IT department, set up the initial system customers are using. IBM's Global Services wants to help--for a fee, of course.

This week, the Global Services division of the company announced two services--one for implementing a new AIX 6.1 operating system on a Power Systems server and another for migrating an AIX 5.3 box to AIX 6.1--to help shops get themselves and their software in order before they move to the latest version of AIX. Under the implementation services offering, IBM's techies come in and plan, install, and configure AIX 6.1 on a box, including helping customers use new features of the PowerVM hypervisor such as workload partitions (WPARs) or even logical partitions (LPARs) if customers have not implemented them yet. A companion service, called migration services for AIX 6.1, helps customers make the jump from AIX 5.3 to AIX 6.1 on an existing machine.

An IBM technician helps customers plan the migration, reviewing requirements, get a handle on applications and related data that needs to be moved, making sure the hardware and application software is compatible with the AIX 6.1, making a list of patches to AIX and systems software that needs to be applied, making sure there are backup datasets for applications and data before the upgrade, and configuring the machine after the migration. The one thing that IBM's techies do not do (not as part of this initial fee, anyway) is sit there and do the upgrade. Pricing was not announced for either of these services, but this is how the IT services sector does business.

The AIX implementation and migration offerings are similar to services that Global Services announced back in March for i 6.1, the other IBM operating system that runs on Power Systems (formerly known as OS/400 and i5/OS). Under that deal, which is similar to the AIX 5.3 to AIX 6.1 migration offering, IBM is charging $5,200 to do all of the pre-migration and post-migration work, which works out to $217 an hour for a two-day gig. That price changes based on local conditions and currency rates around the world, and only includes migration support for an upgrade on up to two logical partitions on a single System i or Power Systems machine.

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