...just need a $5 million mainframe and a room full of silver haired guys to run the mother ship...

As someone interested in the Z platform I've been playing around with zLinux on Hercules which, believe it or not, is a mainframe emulator for your x86 box. It runs like an arthritic tortoise, but seems to work.

I might have to have a go with Sirius now.

When do we get a "Big Blue" icon to go with the good/bad jobs and gates?

(what movie??)

We have Hercules (and, ahem, z/OS) running on a Macbook - and it actually performs quite well!

It is good for porting and lightweight testing.

I wouldn't want to fire up CICS & DB2 or anything like that.

zLinux is slow on real 'z' hardware - there is so much emulation and other voodoo going on under the covers that it is and always will be a slug...

You must have some other problem with your zLinux performance, there is NO emulation going on on real z hardware... suggest you go over to IBMVM listserv and see whats going on http://listserv.uark.edu/archives/ibmvm.html

Regardless of emulation, z hardware is slow anyway. That's why IBM doesn't put out any benchmarks for z. sssssllllllooooowwwwww.....

Even better, go to the Linux for z series list:

http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?linux-390

The Velocity guys can probably help.

Slow? Depends on what you measure. Yes, the processors themselves have not historically been quick but the I/O subsystem is shit hot and will beat the hell out of pretty much anything else in terms of throughput. Horses, courses.

"Depends on what you measure."

How about actual performance. Overall performance. You need a balance and the Mainframe gives you reliability, stability, and predictability but it sure as heck runs slow... But at least you know it'll finish doing what it's doing... someday.