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IBM Kills Free Blade Deal for i Shops, Discounts Blade Chassis and Switches
Published: September 22, 2008
by Timothy Prickett Morgan
Since October 2007, IBM has been offering free BladeCenter blade server configurations to i shops, particularly for those acquiring System i iron or upgrades to it. In March, IBM tweaked this deal, making the spending limits on new or upgraded i machines larger and requiring customers to buy more features to get their free BladeCenter H chassis with a few HS21 Xeon-based blades inside. Last week, IBM killed off that deal, and replaced it with a nominal Web discount on switches used in BladeCenter boxes as well as on the chasses themselves.
The Web discount deal is not limited strictly to i shops, of course, because on the Internet, nobody knows you're an AS/400. Customers buying a BladeCenter E or BladeCenter S chassis (the latter being the one intended for office environments and SMB customers) get a 50 percent discount when they acquire it through the ibm.com store, while the high-end BladeCenter H chassis is getting a 40 percent discount. Under this deal, which expires on November 30, not only does the chassis get a discount, but four different networking modules for linking the blades to each other and to the outside world--the Catalyst Switch Module 3110X, Catalyst Switch Module 3110G, and Catalyst Switch Module 3012 from Cisco Systems and the 1/10 Gb Ethernet Switch Module from Nortel Networks--are getting a 30 percent discount. Each customer is limited to buying one BladeCenter chassis and one switch module under this deal.
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