IBM Deals on Blade Chassis, Tivoli Provisioning Manager

Published: October 12, 2009

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you are looking to move from rack servers to blade servers, or to automate the provisioning and patching of your servers, IBM has some deals for you.

In the first deal, which is described in announcement letter 309-568, Big Blue is giving customers who have non-IBM blade servers a free BladeCenter S or BladeCenter H chassis for every non-IBM chassis they throw out, and customers wanting to move from non-IBM rack servers to BladeCenter blade servers can get a free BladeCenter S or H chassis for every nine rack servers they unplug.

The BladeCenter S chassis, which is designed for a small business office environment, sells on IBM's U.S. Web store for $2,599; it is a 7U chassis that can hold six blade servers and two SAS disk modules (each with six 2.5-inch drives). The BladeCenter H chassis is a 9U box that can hold up to 14 blade servers or a mix of SAS modules and blades; it costs $4,725. (All of IBM's blades are full-height blades, unlike those from Hewlett-Packard and Dell, which have a mix of half-height and full-height blades.) This freebie BladeCenter chassis promotion is available until the end of December.

So is the Tivoli Provisioning Manager discount promotion, which is described in announcement letter 309-565. Under this deal, IBM is cutting the price on this server provisioning tool (which works with bare-metal and logical partitions on Power Systems iron) by 50 percent. The deal applies to the regular Tivoli Provisioning Manager as well as the variant that is sold just to manage Linux partitions on System z mainframes.

This system management tool is priced based on IBM's Processor Value Unit (PVU) metered pricing scheme, and it costs $59.50 for every 10 PVUs for each server node on which the provisioning tool is used. You can see the latest PVU table here. Power 550, 560, 570, 575, and 595 servers are rated at 120 PVUs per core using Power6 or Power6+ processors, while Power 520 entry servers and BladeCenter JS12, JS22, JS23, and JS43 blade servers based on Power6 or Power6+ chips are rated at 80 PVUs per core. System z10 mainframe engines are also rated at 120 PVUs each. Earlier Power4 and Power5 generations of servers carry a PVU rating of 100 per core.

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