@CobraA1
Desperate? hardly... IBM mainframes have been selling quite well over the last decade.... Take a look at their counterparts at Oracle/Sun and HP... Oracle has 7% of the server revenue market share(Sun had 30% of the server revenue market in 2000).... HP... losing support for Itanium from MS, RedHat and Oracle.
Server farm??!! GET A CLUE, virtualization and power/cooling consumption is killing server farms... Pros understand this is a major cost issue...nowadays
IBM's strategy is clearly aimed at HP and their x86 market lead. A majority of mainframe applications have Windows front ends on them... this is clearly an attempt to bring them specifically under IBM's brand, instead of Dell and HP.
Since the underlying hardware for supporting Windows is the same... (x-blade HX5)... they hope to differentiate on other items... $0 hardware support costs... centralized operation/problem notification... private network to native mainframe systems....
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