IBM Gives Big Discounts on Opteron Servers and VMware Hypervisors

Published: October 13, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

You would think, with the economy in such a bad way and IBM wanting to help its resellers as much as possible, it would be giving them a little extra margin to peddle iron that, in turn, helps Big Blue make more sales. And this would be particularly true for X64 servers, which sit side-by-side with AS/400, iSeries, and System i servers at the vast majority of OS/400 and i shops.

And maybe IBM is offering its System x and BladeCenter resellers some extra margin as we try to negotiate the fourth quarter of 2008. But if it isn't, you can bet that plenty of resellers are a bit annoyed at IBM. Last week, IBM tried to get rid of some inventory on its Opteron-based LS21 and LS41 servers by giving a 40 percent discount off the Web price at its online store--meaning, for customers who buy directly from IBM rather than go through the reseller channel. (The Web price is generally a little lower than official IBM list price, too.) The LS21 is a generation back and supports only dual-core Rev F Opterons, while the LS41 is a four-socket blade that supports the new "Barcelona" quad-core Opterons. And for customers who want a four-socket Opteron box, the System x 3755, IBM is giving a 45 percent discount off the Web store price. The System x 3755 supports dual-core Rev F and quad-core Barcelona Opterons in the 8000 series.

If you happen to want to buy VMware's Infrastructure Enterprise Edition server virtualization stack, which includes the ESX Server 3.5 hypervisor and a slew of add-ons to make partitions scale over multiple processors and to give it useful features like VMotion virtual machine teleportation, IBM is giving a 20 percent discount off the Web price, too.

Both deals expire on December 31.

RELATED STORIES

The BladeCenter S Gets a New SAS RAID Disk Module

The Power Systems JS12 and JS22 Blades Versus Other i Boxes

The i Edition of the BladeCenter S Finally Launches

Power Systems: The Feeds and Speeds

Power6 Chips Get i Support in New Entry and Blade Machines

IBM Rejiggers System i and BladeCenter Deal One More Time

IBM's Battle Plan for i5/OS Blade Servers

IBM Cuts i5/OS-Based JS22 Blade Server Prices

Let's Take a Closer Look at JS22 Blade Servers Running i5OS V6R1

IBM Virtualizes I/O in BladeCenter Servers

Power6 Blades Finally Come to Market from IBM

IBM Tweaks BladeCenter S for the Office, Preps Power6 Blades

HP Beats the System i on Integration for Midrange Shops

HP Engineers New Blade Server Box for SMB Shops

IBM Rejiggers BladeCenter for SMBs

                     Post this story to del.icio.us
               Post this story to Digg
    Post this story to Slashdot