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But, don’t you see the paradox there? If customers are happy with their mainframe why would they switch to Red Hat? And if they don’t want to switch why did IBM buy it?

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They may not want to get rid of the hardware, but they may want to run something other than z/OS on it. RHEL is well supported on both IBM midrange and mainframe systemd.

mainframes can run rhel vms which are basically standard rhel installs that you assign RAM/CPU/storage to, with the benefits of mainframe hardware (eg. massive I/O bandwidth) so you can be happy with your mainframe because you are running rhel on it :)

But realistically mainframes are a small part of IBMs business so there are lots of reasons for IBM to buy Red Hat that are entirely unrelated to mainframes or POWER hardware

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