[cholerajoe]

That z990 would easily replace a couple of hundred stan-alone servers. Add the cost savings of maintenance of at LEAST 1 person person per 50 servers. Industry standard is closer to 1 per 20. Its easy to see why even small companies are switching back to IBM mainframes.Also:
Almost zero down time--
Limitless ram capacity(100'S of tera-bytes)--
Transparent hardware IE seen as one computer not thousands--
The Z990 is Linux native and if used as a web server it comes with any app you want(probably Apache).
It WORKS -- IE it never goes down, EVER.

We have quite a few Ancient IBM mainframes and I don't think they have had any down time in 8 years. I think they use 500Mhz 64 bit Alpha chips.
But we had to write all of the code ourselves to use it (them).
This is THEE computer to get for any companies back end computer operations.

Also: All new IBM mainframes come with support included. 5 years I think.

It wouldnt be the computer to get to replace a render-farm though. Being that a render farm doesnt communicate with the world and instead relies on raw CPU power