These servers had a combined 17,000 accounts. AIX1 was mostly used by graduate students and professors, and AIX2 was mostly used by undergraduate students. They were primarily used as e-mail, web and application servers.
These servers have migrated to various versions of the AIX operating system and IBM PowerPC server platforms, dating from 1992 to today. The flexibility of this hardware platform and AIX has allowed us to run the software installed in the early 1990s on the current IBM hardware and the current version of AIX.
Moving to greener pastures
But the number of users and use of AIX1 and AIX2 has dropped off significantly, and the primary uses for the hardware these servers run on, which are the mail, databases, and Banner have moved or are moving. Most e-mail was moved to other platforms a long time ago. The databases were moved to Oracle Exadata database servers, and the Banner is being replaced by Workday. So, the University will decommission the IBM hardware once all the clients using it have migrated to other platforms.
What now?
On the first of May 1 we will shut down AIX1 and AIX2. The few users that have remained on these servers and have notified us that they still must provide web content have been moved to a server called AIX3, which is running on a Linux server. The names AIX1 and AIX2 will remain but will be aliases of AIX3 so that anyone using the old server names will find the information they are looking for, if it’s still being provided by the users that have moved.
If you have content on either of these servers that you need, you will need to copy it somewhere else by this date. If you still need to provide web content hosted on AIX1 or AIX2 and haven’t found anywhere else to host it, please contact the Service Desk.