IBM starts its Winter Sales
With the economy on a perpetual downslide at the moment, it’s fair to say that company’s aren’t to keen on opening up their cheque books and signing away a heap of cash. However, IBM thinks they can make businesses spend a little extra this year.
The computer giant has devised a few deals that are designed to make customers spend a little bit to ensure IBM makes it through the cold, harsh winter, involving the System p and Power Systems products.
On the Power System side, IBM is well aware that customers who didn’t change over to it Power6-based Power Systems machines back in July 2007, are unlikely to change over now unless they have a desperate space need.
The changeover has been ignored by customers due to the application conversion process that is required when customers change over to i 6.1, and because the earlier i5/OS V5R4M5 sub-release is supported on Power6 iron, customers need to have the conversion to unlock all the features of the Power6 chip.
IBM has got it sussed really. They know that eventually customers who have System p and Power Systems iron installed will have to buy some capacity. These servers support “capacity on demand” processor core activation, and capacity is not cheap – IBM charges quite a bit for old Power5 and Power5+ cores as well as Power6 cores.
The capacity upgrade deal covers System p 570, 590 and 595 systems, which span a range from 2 to 64 processor Power5 or Power5+ cores across the three models, and includes the Power Systems 570 machine, which is based on Power6 processors.
IBM is insisting customers have processor cards installed by November 7th so allow them to take part in the deal, and they have until December 19th to place an order to activate the latent processing capacity.
On the Power6-based 570 box, IBM is currently offering a 45 percent discount off the cost of activation of 3.5, 4.2 and 47GHz Power6 cores.
If by now you are completely unaware of how much all this costs, IBM is selling a processor card with a dual-core Power6 chip, running at 4.7GHz, for $11,500, and to activate each of the cores it’ll cost you a further $23,000 for each one. So when you consider the 45 percent discount, it’s not too bad at all.
For older Power5 and Power5+ servers, IBM’s pricing is a little less per core, making it more appealing for customers to move to the new system. IBM want its customers to upgrade now rather than pushing it further back, which is why they are offering a massive 60 percent discount on System p 570, 590 and 595 machines with 1.65, 1.9, 2.1 or 2.3GHz Power5 cores and 1.9 or 2,2GHz Power5+ cores sitting idle. To get the discount on the p 570 machine, customers have to activate two cores at a time, but on the 590 and 595 machines, they can activate the one at a time.
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