As Richard said, AIX 5.2 is out of support, and 5.3 won't be in support
forever.  I work in Healthcare, where vendors are usually very slow to
get off older OS versions, so a customer can't always choose their OS,
they are bound by the support issues of the vendor.  Just this past year
we finally got off all our AIX 5.2 and some 5.1, and even a couple AIX
4.3.3 systems.  Dinosaurs, all of them, but what could we do?  We had to
wait for the vendor's support.  

So the first effort will be to find out what, if anything, is keeping
them at AIX 5.2, and lead the charge to upgrade all the ones you can.  

But does that matter?  Will TSM be running on it's own separate server? 
That is certainly the preferable way to go, in which case you could
install a pSeries server that will support AIX 5.3 or AIX 6, and run a
modern TSM version.  Some of the clients will have to run older TSM
clients, but in my experience that has always worked, if you can stay
just one version behind.  Just because you are running TSM 5.5 server,
doesn't mean you have to run TSM 5.5 clients everywhere; you can run
older TSM clients if you have to.  

When we went from TSM 5.3 to TSM 5.4 and 5.5 server, we still had TSM
5.2 and 5.3 legacy clients, and they still backed up (and more
importantly) restored OK until 6-9 months later when we finally got them
all upgraded.
 
Best Regards,

John D. Schneider
The Computer Coaching Community, LLC
Office: (314) 635-5424 / Toll Free: (866) 796-9226
Cell: (314) 750-8721

 
 
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] TSM 5.4 or 6.1
From: Richard Sims <rbs AT BU DOT EDU>
Date: Sat, October 10, 2009 8:37 am
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU

An obvious, major consideration for your customer is that AIX 5.2 is
out of support:
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/support/systemsp/lifecycle/
This may leave them at jeopardy for security problems, and make it
difficult to add new hardware.

Richard Sims

On Oct 10, 2009, at 9:04 AM, Mehdi Salehi wrote:

> One of our customers is planning to buy TSM for their AIX 5.2
> systems. The
> problem is that the newest version of TSM what supports AIX 5.2 is
> TSM 5.4.
> Two solutions:
> - upgrade AIX systems to 5.3 or 6.1
> - forget about TSM 6.1 and use TSM 5.4
> You know the application side people are unwilling to move their
> environment. I am looking for convincing highlights to motivate
> them to
> upgrade their operating systems instead of downgrading TSM side. What
> features of TSM 6.1 do you think could be interesting from
> executive's point
> of view?