Last year, Mark Shackelford, IT director at Baldor Electric Co. in Forth Smith, Ark., consolidated three mainframes and eight IBM Unix servers onto a single z990 mainframe. Shackelford said he thinks the System z9 Business Class model would be 'a great place to start' for companies that don't already have mainframe experience.

'The hard part of getting nonmainframe people to the platform -- and this is IBM's biggest challenge -- is the initial learning curve,' he said. 'People just don't understand the architecture. Once you do learn it, though, you find it's a lot easier to administer than a typical Windows and Unix environment.'

Schackelford added that, based on his experience, users moving to a mainframe should plan on it taking six months to train their IT staffs and about a year before workers achieve mainframe proficiency.