IBM Slashes iSeries Feature Prices

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the things that OS/400 shops are always complaining about is the high cost of main memory on the machines. While IBM has lots of sophisticated electronics and manufacturing tricks that make AS/400 and iSeries memory cards more costly to make and more valuable than PC server memory, it has still been too expensive. That's why IBM chopped the prices of many AS/400 and iSeries memory cards by 25 percent on October 8. Big Blue cut prices on other features, too.

IBM has chopped AS/400 and iSeries main memory prices for many machines by 25 percent, which means that memory now costs $13.50 per megabyte, down from $18 per megabyte. This price cut, while welcome, does not bring iSeries main memory anywhere near the $1 to $2 per megabyte that companies charge for SDRAM memory modules--including IBM, in the xSeries line. Even for the top-end xSeries 440 server--which will soon scale to 16 processors--main memory costs less than a buck per megabyte.

IBM's price cuts on memory features for the 1 GHz and 1.6 GHz versions of the Integrated xSeries Server (IxS) coprocessor for AS/400 and iSeries machines have, however, brought this PC server memory in line with the open market. IBM was charging more than $3 per megabyte for IxS server memory, and now it is charging $1.41.

IBM has also cut prices on a number of other features. It cut the price of the 1 GHz IxS card to $1,300, down 54 percent from its $2,800 price tag before October 8. Prices on a number of networking- and Linux-related features were also cut by 33 percent. See our table outlining price cuts on AS/400 and iSeries features. Also see the adjunct table showing the decreased iSeries and AS/400 memory upgrade feature prices.

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