AS/400 Maintenance Fees Go Up July 1

Published: April 10, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

All server makers use the carrot and stick approach to compel customers to keep current with their server technologies. The carrot is the improved price/performance they deliver as they roll out their new platform; the stick is ever-increasing maintenance prices on aging equipment. In the middle of March, IBM jacked up maintenance fees on vintage AS/400 gear by approximately 9 percent. That would be the stick part after the Power5+ System i announcements at the end of January.

You can see the price changes in this document and this other one.

The maintenance price hikes apply to the entry 9401 Model 150, and 9402 and 9404 deskside AS/400s in the E, F, 3XX, 4XX, 5XX, 6XX, and SXX families, as well as for the 9406 Model 170, 250, and 270 deskside machines. Price hikes also apply to bigger 9406-class boxes in rack-mounted and standalone big tower servers in the same E through SXX generations as well as on the more recent Model 7XX servers that are more or less concurrent with the Model 250 and 270 deskside machines. Basically, if you are not running an iSeries from May 2000 or later, you now have a higher maintenance bill, and it will be roughly about 9 percent, give or take a few parts of a percent because IBM didn't just take the old price and multiply by 0.09.

Various AS/400 expansion features also will get hit by the price hike. IBM also raised maintenance fees on older "Shark" 2105 disk arrays by around the same amount, and 3490 and 3590 tape drives also saw their monthly maintenance fees increase by 9 to 25 percent.

The price hikes go into effect on July 1.