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Mainframes used to be a lot about concurrent I/O for transaction processing - e.g. booking/check-in/handling of airline passengers or yes, batch transactions in the millions (e.g. end of day calculation within banks or financial information providers).

TCO might be lower with x86 these days, it all depends on your workload.

One possible advantage is faster communication between nodes. If you want to run 2 millions docker containers, probably you'll run few hundred different servers.

If you choose 86 servers, then you need to setup all VMs cluster management, backup, recovery, migration..