on april 8, 2014, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the system/360 mainframe, ibm announced the release of its first converged infrastructure solution based on mainframe technology. dubbed the ibm enterprise cloud system, this new offering combines ibm mainframe hardware, software, and storage into a single system and is designed to compete with competitive offerings from vce, hp, and oracle. according to ibm, it is the most scalable linux server available with support for up to 6,000 virtual machines in a single-footprint.