Yah, given my experience, you buy the mainframe for one of the native zos/etc flavors, and then the IBM sales people basically throw in the IFL's which will nev

Yah, given my experience, you buy the mainframe for one of the native zos/etc flavors, and then the IBM sales people basically throw in the IFL's which will never get used for the zos/etc workloads effectively for such a nominal price, they might as well be free. Then you have half a mainframe of capacity lying about, and why not run some linux workloads on it. I find it _really_ hard to believe that outside of a few really narrow niches anyone is really buying mainframes to run linux workloads. Its just not cost effective. PS: and then of course IBM gets to add it to their total "sold capacity" for the quarter to make it look like the business is growing. So they _want_ you to use all that idle hardware.