I would make the cautious proposal that, if you're looking at consolidating from Intel or Sparc to zSeries, that, if CPU (rather than I/O or memory bandwidth) is really your bottleneck, the project is probably not a good candidate for consolidation.
In short, and in my experience, grain of salt, all that....if what you need is more computing cycles, your most cost-effective option is Intel, assuming that it's a parallelizable workload. If it's not then you're probably looking at something like a pSeries, for extremely high per-processor performance. If disk or memory bandwidth is your bottleneck zSeries may be a very good choice. If you're not hitting any constraints and can't easily tell which wall you're going to hit first, there's probably not an effective near-term case for consolidation in any event. If infrastructure management is your primary bottleneck--and this requires thinking outside the box a bit, since it's not something you can directly measure on the machines--then zSeries may be an excellent candidate for you. Adam
