Platform Solutions Inc (PSI), the company suing IBM for monopolizing the mainframe market while IBM tries to put it out of business, has given IBM a bigger target to shoot at.

This week it expanded its line, pushing out a Microsoft SQL machine – Microsoft is after all a recent investor and has always wanted in on IBM’s high-end turf – and an SMB-oriented version of its dual-core Itanium-based Open Mainframe; both boxes run IBM’s mainframe operating systems as well as Linux, Windows and Unix, which is what aggravates IBM.

The new 26MIPS-460MIPS PSI System64 MS is the existing NEC 8U rack-mounted Express5800 1080 server in disguise, an extension of PSI’s System64 DS that doubles CPU and I/O capacity. It’s supposed to target data centers that are strained by power, cooling and real estate constraints.

The widgetry was demonstrated at the Share users meeting this week running PSI’s virtualization technology providing high-performance virtual guests for Windows and Linux images.

System 64 MS can support up to 14 z/OS LPARS or 128 Windows Server or Linux images.

PSI is also using Express5800 hardware, which leverages NEC’s vector supercomputer and mainframe technology, to push Microsoft’s new Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 into the hard-core data center.