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.
This may be true, but because there's basically no on ramp to running on a mainframe, there's no way anybody is going to try it unless they're already on a mainframe. Or maybe unless they really need something that only a mainframe can provide. But most companies can live with some downtime, and once you can live with some downtime, you have options for migration between sites, and options for migrating loads so you can swap parts on a stopped machine. Splurging on network infrastructure with multi-chasis redundancy is an easier step to take to get to a more reliable system than building against a totally different system architecture.
You can get a partition of IBM Z to run in the cloud. The cost is about $5/hr for the smallest configuration.
> Splurging on network infrastructure with multi-chasis redundancy is an easier step to take to get to a more reliable system than building against a totally different system architecture.
Yes and no. If you truly need that redundancy than the mainframe is going to provide a much better version of it. SYSPLEXs and LPARs are some insanely powerful technologies.