> AFAIK, low end zseries is about 1,200,000. > > http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/linuxconfig/ mind you, that's a brand-new z900; including a year of support. if you get a used Multiprise 3000; I hear they can be had for a few hundred thousand. mind you; you'll still need the support contract, and a disk array for it. (I think they come with only 3 SCSI disks). Disk arrays for those things are not cheap, mind you. You could probably cobble together some sort of SAN arrangement; but even over GigE, you're really going to hurt the I/O performance of a 390; which is its main strength. Anyone know what a StorageTek, IBM, or EMC array for an S/390 costs? just for a couple hundred GB. (I think they're just ordinary fiber-attached arrays now). then of course, there's the cost of doing backups. (which actually might not be bad for only a couple hundred GB.) so yeah; they beat discrete boxes for cost, and beat just about anything else for I/O performance (which is what kills most webservers and dbase servers anyway); but you have to look at replacing a couple of racks of shiny new SPARCs, or a handful of racks of shiny new PCs before they become really cost-effective. of course, the bragging rights are what really make it worthwhile. :) Carl Soderstrom. -- Network Engineer Real-Time Enterprises (952) 943-8700