Today, IBM unveiled the latest edition to its family of enterprise “big iron” aimed at broadening the appeal of mainframes. And while IBM’s existing mainframe customers may have reason to be interested in the zEnterprise BC12 as an upgrade, IBM is offering a version aimed squarely at new customers: one that runs Linux only. IBM claims the zBC12 is capable of running 520 virtual Linux servers simultaneously at a cost as low as a dollar a day per Linux server instance.

The Linux-only system, branded as the Enterprise Linux Server (ELS), comes with IBM’s z/VM virtualization hypervisor, and Big Blue says it has been tested with over 3,000 Linux applications. IBM is also offering two extensions for specific applications: ELS for Analytics, a software package that includes Cognos and SPSS software for business analytics applications (including support for Cognos’ iPad-based data visualization client), and Cloud-Ready for Linux on System z, a software suite that turns the mainframe into a Infrastructure-as-a-service platform, allowing for the automated provisioning Linux servers on demand for users. The zBC12 also includes the new “Crypto as a Service" capability of z/OS, which allows Linux applications running within the mainframe environment to use z/OS’s encryption services.

The zBC12 includes a number of performance enhancements over IBM’s previous “midrange” offering, the z114. It uses a faster, 4.2GHz 64-bit z/Architecture processor (an improvement over the z114’s 3.8GHz CPUs), and has twice the maximum memory of the z114 at 498GB. And as far as mainframes go, the zBC12 is priced to move, starting at $75,000—or for lease starting at $1,965 a month. That’s roughly half the cost of buying the equivalent computing power in commodity x86 hardware.