Lots of great tools are available to help you evaluate and manage performance.

Written by David Tansley

This article looks at some of the popular tools available to gather information. Based on that information, you can then implement performance-related changes if required.

When looking at performance issues, I tend to group them into the following categories:

• CPU bound
• Memory bound
• Disk access
• Network
• Process monitoring

IBM continues to gain share in the UNIX market, so what does the future hold for AIX running on Power?

Written by Chris Smith

IBM's revenue share of the UNIX market shot up in the fourth quarter of 2010 to about 50 percent, and the company reestablished itself as the world's leading provider of servers.

Both Gartner and IDC released their estimates last week of how the world's leading server providers fared during the last quarter of 2010. While the numbers from each differed, both put IBM at the top for overall server revenue as well as for UNIX server revenue.

Experienced administrators who need a quick, basic introduction to AIX performance tuning will want this handy reference on their bookshelf.

Written by Barry L. Kline

For many years, the "i" and "p" platforms have been completely distinct, and as a result, those of us who spent most of our professional lives using the various incarnations of OS/400 may never have seen a pSeries running AIX. Given the recent merger of the iSeries and pSeries into the Power platform, that era may soon pass. It's just too darned easy to build an AIX partition and to migrate functions from i5/OS to a platform better suited for certain things, such as mail servers and Internet-based infrastructure. And of course, if you ever need to run Oracle, you'll have no choice but to use something other than i5, so why not leverage the hardware we've come to know and love?