It's run flawlessly for years.
That's exactly why
it's at risk.
Years of clean uptime feel like proof of health. But uptime is also how these systems hide: patch levels drift, backups go unverified, and the one person who really understands the box gets closer to the door — none of it visible on a dashboard. We're the senior AIX and IBM Power engineers who go look. Start free: pick one system, and we'll hand you a full PowerTrue Blueprint for it — the same plan we sell for the whole estate, free on one of your machines.
A PowerTrue Blueprint is the complete, guided plan for safely updating one of your systems — every fix, in the right order, sequenced to minimize risk. Free for one system you pick; the paid Blueprint plans your whole estate.
Founder-run by a senior specialist with ~30 years in enterprise infrastructure — two decades of it on IBM Power and AIX — including 15 years on a large insurance Power estate and managed Power infrastructure at a cloud provider. Across the team, 60 years of combined AIX and IBM Power experience.
The risk concentrates on one fragile point.
A system that runs quietly for years isn't proving it's healthy — quiet is just the absence of a reason to check. When someone finally does look, the findings usually cluster in the same four places.
A compliance gap you can't fully see.
Your auditor asks how you know the system meets the controls. "It's never had a problem" isn't evidence — and until someone measures, there is no evidence either way.
Years of quiet security drift.
Nobody hardened it recently because nothing forced them to. Patch levels age and disclosed CVEs accumulate — none of it visible from the fact that the login prompt still comes up.
No proven recovery — or upgrade — path.
The backups report success. Success means they wrote, not that they restore — and when the hardware or OS finally has to move, nobody has ever rehearsed the path.
The expertise heading for the door.
One person understands this system, and everything unwritten about it leaves on their last day. The environment stays; the understanding doesn't.
None of this means the system is badly run. It means it's unmeasured — and unmeasured is where risk hides. Seeing where one of your systems actually stands costs nothing.
The people who know these systems are leaving faster than they're replaced.
AIX remains under active enterprise development, with IBM's roadmap committed into the 2030s5 — and it runs workloads that can't simply move. The expertise to care for it is another matter.
Most AIX outages aren't exotic. They're deferred.
A filesystem that filled up. A mirror that broke quietly in March and nobody noticed. A mksysb no one ever test-restored. A patch level three years behind the CVE list. An error log that had been warning for weeks. These are the ordinary ways these systems go down — and every one of them is visible in advance, if someone is looking.
Two things, and they're different. AIXray is the assessment — our read-only engine that answers "where does this system stand?": 60+ checks across nine categories, scored red, amber, green, in plain English. It only reads; it never changes anything — a single script transparent enough to read line by line before it runs. The PowerTrue Blueprint is the plan — how to safely bring that system current, every fix in the right order. A senior engineer runs the assessment on one system you choose and hands you the full Blueprint for that machine — free, no obligation, yours to keep either way. About AIXray →
Real output from a sanitized AIX 7.3 LPAR — this is the report you keep.
From "nobody's looked" to never falling behind again.
Four stages, each one earned before the next. You can stop after any of them and keep everything.
AIXray
The assessment. Our read-only engine looks at one system — end-of-support exposure, patch and CVE currency, storage, errors, security — and scores it red, amber, green, in plain English. It only reads and changes nothing, and it's transparent enough to read line by line before it runs.
PowerTrue Blueprint
The plan the assessment feeds: the complete, guided path to safely bring systems current — every fix, in the right order, risk-sequenced. Free for one system you pick — real and complete, never a sample. Paid for your whole estate — hardware, HMCs, VIOS, and every LPAR, updated in one risk-minimized sequence. A low-cost engagement, 100% credited if you proceed within 90 days. Yours to keep and act on with anyone.
PowerTrue Fortify
We follow the Blueprint and do the fixing: neglected systems brought current, hardened, and documented — priced by condition, with a defined finish line it visibly reaches.
PowerTrue Refresh
When the Blueprint says the estate isn't worth fixing in place: we build and run a new, current, hardened Power environment; your team moves your applications onto it.
PowerTrue Bulwark
We keep it from drifting backward: the managed service that holds every system at the fortified standard — monitoring, structured patching, verified backups, capacity and lifecycle planning, a monthly report. So the backlog that brought you here never re-forms.
The order is the point: AIXray assesses, the Blueprint plans, Fortify does the fixing, and Bulwark keeps it that way — permanently. You can stop after any stage and keep every written artifact.
Evidence-based, not patch-and-pray.
The first real work in almost every neglected estate is an upgrade — bringing systems current that haven't been touched in years. The industry's usual method is a change window and a prayer. Ours is different: map the risk first, in writing, from evidence — what's actually running, what's known to break on that path, what the rollback is — before anything is touched.
And every engagement makes the method sharper. What we verify in one upgrade — the failure modes, the safe paths, what actually broke and why — is captured into a curated intelligence library we are building deliberately, so the next similar system starts from evidence instead of folklore. It's early, it's ours, and it compounds.
- Deterministic automation does the doing. Everything that touches a client system is a tested, version-controlled runbook or monitoring rule — real experts in the loop and deterministic automation, not an LLM guessing in the dark on production.
- AI does the thinking, not the acting. Our platform reads advisories at scale, cross-checks findings, and drafts plans — then hands a senior engineer a prepared decision. It proposes; it never disposes.
- An expert is always in the middle. Every change is made or approved by a named engineer, logged, and attributable — and your data stays on models we operate, never an outside AI service without your explicit, contracted consent.
- How we use AI — and how we protect your data →
Two people usually land on this page.
It's your name on the audit.
You're the director or CISO accountable for a platform you can't fully see into — and "it's never gone down" is not an answer you want to give an examiner from hope. Start with evidence: one system, assessed free, in writing.
You never chose AIX — it landed on you.
You run the application; the Unix box underneath became yours when the last specialist left, and there was no runbook. The free assessment and Blueprint give you an honest, written picture of that system — where it stands in plain English, and a plan to fix it, in order. Act on it yourself, or carry it upstairs as the case for getting help.
The support clock is already running.
If you run Power9 with VIOS 3.1, you are already past two support cliffs.
- April 2023AIX 7.1 end of support — paid service extensions only since.6
- January 2026Power9 scale-out servers (S914 / S922 / S924) end of standard support — no further IBM firmware or security fixes under standard service.7
- April 2026VIOS 3.1 end of standard support — the virtualization layer beneath most Power9 estates.8
- November 2026AIX 7.3 TL2 end of support — and TL3 follows in December 2027. Staying patched is continuous work.9
Quietly in production today.
We care for 16 enterprise Linux systems for a regional health system — where downtime is measured in patient impact, not dollars. The IBM Power hardware underneath has led independent server-reliability rankings for 16 consecutive years4 — exceptional engineering that still depends on disciplined people to run it. That discipline is the job we do.
- No single point of failure. Your environment is captured in writing — runbooks, an indexed history, a living per-system record — so running it never depends on one person's memory.
- Evidence, not adjectives. Every statistic we publish is cited; our estimates are labeled as estimates.
- Senior specialists. The work is done by engineers with decades on IBM Power and AIX — not a first-tier ticket queue.
- It compounds. The service understands your environment a little better every month it runs.
It stops being a black box. Permanently.
A monthly report you can actually read.
What was patched, what was found, what's coming — written for a manager to read in ten minutes and hand to leadership.
An environment that's written down.
Runbooks, an indexed history, a living record of every system — documentation that stays yours, so nothing about your environment lives only in someone's head. Including ours.
Work you can verify, not take on faith.
Every action is tied to a named person, logged, and session-recorded — with the recordings kept in your environment, not ours.
The value isn't only that the work gets done. It's that you can see it being done — and explain it, in one sentence, to anyone who asks.
Built for the question your examiner asks first.
For a hospital or a credit union, the first objection is "where does our data go, and what touches it?" Our answer is architectural, not a promise.
In your environment
Monitoring runs on a hardened appliance inside your walls — agentless, outbound-only, no VPN. Nothing of ours sits in your critical path.
Scrubbed before it's stored
Secrets and sensitive data are redacted before anything is written down.
No third-party AI by default
Analysis runs on models we operate; your data is never sent to an outside AI service without your explicit, contracted consent.
Named accounts, full audit
Every action is tied to a named person and logged, and session recordings stay on the appliance — in your environment, not ours.
Predictable. Simple. Built for a decade, not a quarter.
We publish the shape of the model, not a rate card. Managed-service pricing scales with your estate — talk to us, and we'll quote it from your assessment. Getting to the standard (PowerTrue Fortify) is priced by each system's measured condition — the assessment is the pricing instrument, so the price argues for itself.
Per managed system
One monthly rate per system under care — LPAR, VM, VIOS, or the frame itself.
One service level
Every system gets identical care. No classifications to choose, no thresholds to game.
Graduated with scale
The per-system rate steps down as your managed estate grows.
A 3-year partnership
Locked rate schedule and priority terms for organizations planning in decades.
Get a free Blueprint for one of your systems.
Pick one system. We'll assess it the way we would on day one of managing it, walk you through the findings, and hand you a full PowerTrue Blueprint for that machine — same format and rigor as the paid full-estate Blueprint, scoped to one system. The one-system Blueprint is free, no obligation. Powered by AIXray, our own assessment engine.
Sources
- Fortra, 2026 IBM i Marketplace Survey (n=315), via IT Jungle, "Skills Displaces Cybersecurity As Top Concern For IBM i Shops," Feb 2, 2026. itjungle.com. Survey covers IBM i shops — the same IBM Power platform and talent pool. Retrieved June 2026.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Network and Computer Systems Administrators, 2024–34 projections (occupation-wide, not AIX-specific). bls.gov. Retrieved June 2026.
- Uptime Institute, Annual Outage Analysis 2025 (survey of data-center operators; respondents' most recent significant, serious, or severe outage). uptimeinstitute.com. Retrieved June 2026.
- ITIC 2024 Global Server Hardware & Server OS Reliability Survey (1,950 businesses, self-reported), via TechChannel, Nov 27, 2024. techchannel.com. Retrieved June 2026.
- IT Jungle, "AIX: The Last Standing Commercial Unix," Feb 13, 2023. itjungle.com. Retrieved June 2026.
- IBM AIX support lifecycle (mirrored at endoflife.date). Retrieved June 2026.
- IBM announcement letter AD25-0134; IT Jungle, "A Year From Now, Most Power9 Systems Bite The Rust," Jan 27, 2025. itjungle.com. Paid IBM support extensions and third-party maintenance remain available; E950/E980 not included. Retrieved June 2026.
- IBM, PowerVM VIOS Lifecycle Information. ibm.com. Retrieved June 2026.
- IBM AIX support lifecycle via endoflife.date and Park Place Technologies EOSL data. Retrieved June 2026.