[krylon]

If you can deal with the price tag, mainframes are very nice machines in a lot of ways (scalability, availabity, storage). And if you're a large-ish bank or other financial company, chances are the amount of data you need to process and the requirements on availability you need to meet mean you're going to need something mainframe-sized anyway.

Plus, IBM and assorted companies treat backward compatibility religiously, so a random update to the OS or the DBMS breaking your application is pretty much unheard of. That kind of reliability is worth a lot to some companies.

The price tag is rather harsh, though.