The IBM mainframe turns 50 years old this month, and as part of the celebration, IBM is introducing the IBM Enterprise Cloud System, which brings cloud computing to the mainframe platform. IBM Enterprise Cloud System is based on open standards, including Linux, and can support up to 6,000 VMs on a single machine. According to Big Blue, Linux-based clouds running on mainframe infrastructure cost up to 55 percent less than those running on x86 systems.
In addition, the IBM Enterprise Cloud System also introduces a new pricing model which allows customers to pay based on their compute consumption, not based on the total capacity of the system they’ve deployed.
