IBM announced Thursday an open beta program for AIX, the company's Unix operating system. Version 6 of AIX exploits the Power 6 microprocessor, which offers advances in energy conservation and virtualization, IBM said. AIX runs on IBM System p Unix servers. Featured in the new OS are capabilities for security, virtualization, near-continuous availability and manageability, the company said. A workload partitions IBM announced Thursday an open beta program for AIX, the company’s Unix operating system.Version 6 of AIX exploits the Power 6 microprocessor, which offers advances in energy conservation and virtualization, IBM said. AIX runs on IBM System p Unix servers. Featured in the new OS are capabilities for security, virtualization, near-continuous availability and manageability, the company said. A workload partitions capability in version 6 provides for software-based virtualization reducing the number of OS images that have to be managed. Another feature, live application mobility, relocates a running workload. Role-based access control in version 6 is a security enhancement enabling administrators to grant authorization for management of specific AIX resources to users. IBM plans to make AIX 6 generally available in the fourth quarter of this year. To participate in the beta, current AIX clients can visit IBM here and follow links to the open beta Web page here. Technology Industry