systems Big Iron remains big business for Big Blue IBM has posted an announcement that teases the introduction of rack-mounted and single-frame versions of its z17 mainframes.Big Blue’s documentation for the z17 mentions only a model called the ME1 that scales from single-rack to four-rack systems.The Tuesday announcement mentions bundles called the z17 ME2 and IBM z17 MER, respectively a single-frame and rack-mounted affair. The announcement doesn’t offer any specs but says they “complete the IBM z17 product family.” REG AD IBM asserts that a z17 ME2 packing a single integrated accelerator for AI on an OLTP network “matches the throughput of running inferencing on a compared remote x86 server with 21 cores.” That’s not enormously impressive given that x86 processors can now pack hundreds