As usual you a re clueless to the midrange / mainframe market and the ROI and TCO figures - but here's a clue - any MS configuaration that could, in theory, satisfy the same needs (uptime, transaction speed, etc...) exceeds the costs of the midrange mainframe systems by exponential figures.....
And to think I've actually been saying nice things about you to others recently.
Do you believe that there is no place in the computing environment for mainframes? There are many situations where anything else is wildly inappropriate.
And the cost of actually maintaining that mainframe crap is astronomical...
On the contrary, the cost is much manpower and maintenance cost is much cheaper. The hardware and OS appear to have a high price tag. But for the Fortune 500 that depend on performance and availability and can spread that large amount of processing and data across the bit cost, the actual ROI is very favorable.
I can show you many Fortune 500 where 60% plus of the IT budget has gone to non-mainframe for each of the past 15 years and in some years it was 80%. Yet they still have no useful client-server system that isn't more than just an expensive 3274 controller middleware between the backend and the screen.
That being said, it should be noted that the biggest IT cost is not the hardware or software platform. The biggest cost and lost opportunity is the bad design of application systems. A well designed application on the average platform is always better than a lousy design on the best platform.
Every day I see bad application designs on both mainframe and non-mainframe platforms.