...

Thought about an IBM mainframe. Running costs are too high, you need a very rich organization/group of people for that. It's probably gonna be real Linux servers again and no virtuality.

Don't underestimate the cost of running a few thousand Linux servers. According to this article the cost of running a mainframe is 10% of that running individual servers. "Indeed, the cost savings attributed to the mainframe deployment come from many different areas. Doug Neilson, a systems consultant for IBM enterprise systems, explains that savings can come from unlikely sources: "A lot of the savings are going to be on infrastructure, space, power and cooling - it's ironic that what used to be labelled as the mainframe dinosaur now uses dramatically less power in cooling than a typical server farm. If you think about a typical Intel server consuming, lets say a Kilowatt, well the biggest z900 mainframe consumes around 15KW and is capable of functionally replacing a couple of thousand NT servers, so the cost savings in power can be dramatic. Just on electricity power savings the mainframe cost can be justified.""

Of course, you do need a big corporation to run a mainframe, while you can distribute PC style servers closer to their owners. Some time ago I said I was against running a server in the place you live. But I didn't consider then that PC/Linux servers are also getting less obtrusive and easier to manage. Given the necessary connection uptime and speed, I'm all for having a server in the household it belongs to, maybe something like a Cobalt Qube, without keyboard and monitor, managed via wireless LAN from any laptop.

merci beaucoup pour le googlecachedoc. very much appreciated!