Getting the same performance and feature out a mainframe will be considerably expensive I would guess. And in addition to that you are buying into an incredibly closed ecosystem where prices only go up from there.
You are also paying for a bunch of stuff you don't need. Most people just don't need to hot swap a CPU or turn these single socket 128 core machines into a gigantic 4096 machine either.
Simply moving virtual machine off and restarting or replacing a sled is enough for the waste majority of use-cases.
This is still pretty much commodity single socket server platforms, just with more sane and open firmware and a sane open source software stack.
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Getting the same performance and feature out a mainframe will be considerably expensive I would guess. And in addition to that you are buying into an incredibly closed ecosystem where prices only go up from there.
You are also paying for a bunch of stuff you don't need. Most people just don't need to hot swap a CPU or turn these single socket 128 core machines into a gigantic 4096 machine either.
Simply moving virtual machine off and restarting or replacing a sled is enough for the waste majority of use-cases.
This is still pretty much commodity single socket server platforms, just with more sane and open firmware and a sane open source software stack.