On unreliable commodity hardware, you would build a cluster and cluster OS / scheduler that would keep your service and jobs running while individual servers di

On unreliable commodity hardware, you would build a cluster and cluster OS / scheduler that would keep your service and jobs running while individual servers died. With a mainframe, you save costs on software development by just assuming the hardware is 100% reliable. The z14 has a ton of cache and does everything it can for single threaded performance, but for the money you could buy a ton of cores (Intel Xeons or AMD chips) and trounce the mainframe on benchmarks that can use the parallelism. For the money, you would be able to buy the gear to have a lot of bandwidth between nodes and to the storage.