[genmud]

When I moved from a tech company to an aero company who used mainframes, there were literally hordes of IBM contractors who helped maintain the mainframe environments. Getting anything done in those environments was a multi month project, even for basic stuff like patching the OS. There were probably 2 or more sysadmins per rack, employed to just keep the damn lights on those boxes.

For context, there was about 1 admin for every 400 servers at the tech company, and that was for the entire tech stack (LAMP).

Mainframes require a lot of care and feeding. In my experience, having worked at 3 different companies who relied on them (education, aero and finance), their capex is higher, their opex is higher and their uptime / reliability is entirely dependent on the facilities / staffing.