AIX6 open beta

I think you're seriously understating the abilities and performance of AIX in general and AIX 6 in particular.

You compare the Workload Partitions to Solaris Zones, but don't mention that AIX 5 has had hypervisor based virtualisation for years now on power5 equipment, along with Workload Management at the operating system layer. The new partitions just let you do things a third way if you so choose, after all flexibility is good.

You criticise the TPC-C benchmark as well in another post, the cynic in me wonders if that's because Sun don't have a system in the top 10, it's a benchmark dominated by HP and IBM. If Sun could get a machine in that top 10, I have absolutely no doubt they would publish the results.

I thought the high-profile feature of Solaris 10 was ZFS, a purely catchup feature to AIX and even Linux despite the marketing hype, as before ZFS Solaris relied on Veritas to give it an enterprise class Volume manager and filesystem, something AIX has had built-in since the AIX4 days.

Solaris is an excellent Unix operating system, just as AIX is, and HP-UX are, all 3 are more than capable of running pretty much any task you want, though they have different ways of doing it. To me the main differentiator between the 3 over the last couple of years has been hardware, Sun have gone with the "many-core" concept, which works very well under some circumstances, HP went with Itanium which looks to have been a horrible mistake, and IBM have Power5+ and now Power6, which is in raw performance terms, the fastest chip you can get right now.

If you need a machine to give you very high performance without having to buy 128 cores worth of Oracle CPU licences, your choice at the moment is obvious.