The successor IBM Mainframes are still alive... for the time being.
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they also moved on three more CPU generations since that redbook, to z17.
I think it's Linux on Z that makes it sexy and keeps it young, in addition to a number of crazy features, like a hypervisor that can share CPUs between tenants, and a hardware that support live migration of running processes between sites (via fibre optic interconnect) and the option to hot swap any parts on a running machine.
It's doing a number of things in hardware and hypervisor that need lots of brain power to emulate on commodity hardware.
_and_ it's designed for throughput, from grounds up.
Depending on your workload there may be very good economical reasons to consider a mainframe instead of a number of rack-frames.
They feel fantastic when running Linux, but, if you don't need all the reliability features that come with the platform, commodity hardware might be a better choice for the kind of workload that has evolved on Linux.
> Depending on your workload there may be very good economical reasons to consider a mainframe instead of a number of rack-frames.
Absolutely - it makes a lot of the administrative toil disappear. I know clusters are sexy, but getting the job done is always better.