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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

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 [theregister.co.uk].

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.

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