In a post last week titled "," IBM said, "In the fourth quarter of 2011, IBM intends to offer select IBM System x blades running Microsoft Windows in the IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension Model 002."

HISTORY:

is a mainframe product line introduced last year, while System x is IBM's line of x86 servers for Windows and . With the BladeCenter extension, System x servers are integrated with the mainframe and managed from the same console.

Analyst Wayne Kernochan of Infostructure Associates expressed excitement about IBM's upcoming move in a new article titled "IBM's 2011 System z: Windows Support Is Big News."

It's not quite full integration between Windows and the mainframe but it's an important step, he writes. Windows and the mainframe, he notes, have been the two most difficult platforms to combine, partly due to technical difficulties and partly because IBM and Microsoft seem to think "users just don't care that much."