IBM Cuts Disk Prices, Rejiggers Memory and CPU Conversion Prices

Published: October 20, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It's the fourth quarter and what could be a particularly difficult one for server sales by any vendor, so you have to expect that IBM will make some changes to the price list. But, in a sign of IBM's confidence in its Power Systems lineup as 2008 comes to a close, the deals and price changes are pretty minimal.

IBM already cut pricing on memory features for Power Systems machines in August before it doubled up the processor counts in the Power Systems 520, 550, and 570 two weeks ago. Last Tuesday, IBM slashed prices on disk features used in Power Systems and System i servers, chopping prices by between 23.9 percent and 49.3 percent, depending on the disk features and the servers that they plug into. (See the companion table to this story at this link for the details.) The disk prices were changed for disks formatted for AIX and Linux (which have different block sizes) and for i5/OS and i operating systems, and should help boost disk sales among existing customers as well as to shops buying new Power Systems machines or upgrading to them. Disk capacity is one of the more expensive items in a reasonably configured system, so such a big price change can affect buying decisions--particularly for server consolidation of Unix and Linux workloads or Windows infrastructure workloads that can be ported to Linux relatively easily.

IBM also cut the price on the 3.5 GHz Power6 processor card for Power 550 servers, by 47.1 percent to $3,828. In another tweak, IBM chopped the base 0-32 GB main memory card for Power 570 machines by 53.1 percent to $8,680. This is just the cost of the card with memory in it, but with none of the memory activated.

In the second part of the price change announcement from last week, IBM rejiggered conversion costs for processor and memory features for Power 570 and Power 595 machines and upgrades from prior generations of 9406 System i 570 and System i 595 servers. In many cases, prices went up. Go figure. You can see the price changes in this table. Trying to figure out what these conversions are would take about a week. I started doing them, but this newsletter would not be on press if I figured out every possible conversion in this table. I blame IBM for making this all so difficult. It should not be this hard to figure out what a feature is, what it costs, and what the price change is.

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