“The z900 will be priced at several million dollars per machine
and will be able to process 90 billion transactions daily, said IBM
Corp., Armonk, N.Y. The new supercomputer is also faster, running
about 2,800 million instructions per second — a 75 percent
acceleration from the previous generation.”
“IBM’s new strategy lets customers buy one of the machines
and pay for only the computing and software power that they use.
Capacity is added by flicking a switch to access what is already
there rather than installing an extra machine.”
“The z900 is the best server on the market, said Sanford,
because of the number of transactions it can do, its ability to fix
self-diagnosed problems, and its flexibility to adjust to
unpredictable demand. The new system also runs on Linux, a
nonproprietary flavor of the Unix OS that is favored by Internet
companies and that IBM hopes will make mainframes a hit.”