The mainframe hardware isn&#x27;t anything special (I&#x27;ve said this before, I still have access to a z114). You can probably host that many lxc containers on a decent x86 server too. Not that you probably want to.<p>The z114 CPU doesn&#x27;t keep up with anything &gt; midrange x86, and its IO capabilities are limited by the inifiniband links it uses to communicate with the IO drawers. A pretty basic dual socket E5 v3 has more PCIe bandwidth available than you can get out of the z114. It appears that is the case for larger machines as well (aka there are E7 configurations with significantly more bandwidth than the z13). And yes, I&#x27;ve heard all about SC&#x27;s and all that. But what most people fail to realize is that most storage adapters have some form of ARM&#x2F;etc cpu onboard that does most of what the SC does on a mainframe, and people have been fighting the CPU vs offload engine battle for years for network adapters.<p>So, a lot of the mainframe advantage is in zOS&#x2F;zTPF and not the hardware. Running linux with its inefficient block layer, misses the point.<p>Heck, your probably better off running linux on POWER8.