I guess that's one way to look at it. I remember a story from earlier this 
year that announce the Swedish(?) company Telia replacing a large number 
(more than 50 but less than 100) Sun servers with a brand spanking new 
zSeries running Linux. They were going to provide web services for all 
800,000 of their subscribers. (I think that's the number.)  One quote that I 
heard about pricing these things was if the average cost of a rackmounted 
system, all pieces, was $1000 and a zSeries (S/390) could be had for 
$1,000,000. Then all you needed to do was run 1001 instances on your zSeries 
to be ahead of the game. I realize this is a simplistic arguement but it does 
get to the heart of the matter. Bob's other response to this e-mail with some 
rough numbers on the non-mainframe costs shows some of the other things that 
come into play. 

Jack

On Thursday 05 April 2001 08:14, you wrote:
> I've never understood why people are so damned fascinated with
> Linux on the S/390.  I get to work on SuSE/390, and it really isn't that
> impressive.  The box isn't any more responsive than the Linux PC on
> my desk.  Sure, you can put lots of them on one box - but if you're wanting
> to actually save money, you're better off buying small boxes.  Or, buying
> a higher end Sun box and just intelligently administrating it.
>
> Grump.
>
> - Nick Reinking
>
>
>
>
>
>
> dopp at acm.cs.umn.edu, on 04/05/2001 07:44:36 AM
> To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org @ PMDF
> cc:
> Subject: Re: [TCLUG] DSL woes
>
> > > Who's going to admin an S390, though?  Does Real Time have any
> > > mainframe admins?
> >
> > Mainframe, Linux, NT is there a difference? :-)
> >
> > Carl can jump in here, but from the presentation on the S390 it seems
> > like
>
> there
>
> > is going to be a web(?) interface to the 390 so you just point-n-click.
>
> Won't someone need to be experienced in OS/390 to partition the mainframe?
> If there is a web interface, that's very cool, however.
>
> Gabe