While looking into all the mainframe claims we (Jeff Savitt) discovered, lots of incorrect comparisons that were used when comparing new mainframe systems to 2-3 year old Unix systems (new with old comparison). Well a colleague in Germany has just busted another rather silly comparison, albeit for a new Unix servers to old Unix comparison, you can see the write up here.

Now I speculated that the equivalent amount of rack space of Sun Niagara servers e.g. T5220 would be able to successfully consolidate (1250 per rack) more servers than a mainframe, note the term successfully. I remember a while ago some very large mainframe Unix/linux consolidations failed.

This article is well worth looking into, the power and cooling characteristics of the T5220 will definitely have an competitive edge over the lifetime of the mainframe especially once you take into account the cooling and power requirements of the mainframe. Plus you can start small with the 2U T5220, and build in low cost pieces with one small T5220 at a time. With the big iron mainframe, cost of entry and cost of exit is very much more expensive.

Anyway thanks to Joerg in Sun Germany for another very good and simple explanation of more realistic and sensible comparisons.