What can you accomplish with an IBM mainframe that you could not do on x86 Linux servers? I would probably word that as what can a mainframe do that commodity

What can you accomplish with an IBM mainframe that you could not do on x86 Linux servers? I would probably word that as what can a mainframe do that commodity servers can not. They are more reliable and allow for spinning up a vast number of workloads with incredibly fast virtual networking. If one needed a "cloud" of Linux nodes, a Z16 would be insanely fast deployment and teardown of workloads on demand and those nodes could talk to each other with very little latency and high throughput. Some companies and organizations need a small private cloud (think pod or blast-radius contained mini region) that can spin up their cloud region on demand. Even in a catastrophic failure, the fault blast radius is limited to the group of racks comprising the mainframe. The cost is not just hardware. Anything IBM is going to be IBM supported and your business would have factored that into the ROI/TCO. The contracts are very expensive but you have the highest level engineers a phone call away and if you require it they can also remotely diagnose problems and have replacement parts in {n} hours based on the contract. Not everyone needs this of course which understandably leads many to question the cost.