Slang for large, expensive, ultra-fast computers or systems. Associated with  '''number-crunching''' supercomputers such as Crays, but also include more conventional big commercial IBMish mainframes and high-end servers for large companies or organizations with deep pockets or computation-intensive needs. Term of approval; compare '''heavy metal''', oppose '''dinosaur'''. 

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While speed and I/O throughput is a major concern with BigIron, these days the main concern with machines of this type seem to revolve around ultra-high availability and reliability.  For high-performance number-crunching, large farms of cheap computers clustered together seem to be the way to go these days, rather than a big freon-cooled box that sucks more electricity than an aluminum smelter...

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Also see BigIronAintCheap, BigIronDatabase, http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/big-iron.html
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CategoryJargon, CategoryEnterpriseComputingConcerns