IBM, Novell Offer Chassis-Level Linux Pricing on Blades

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server maker IBM and commercial Linux distributor Novell have hammered out a deal that will allow customers who deploy SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 on IBM's BladeCenter blade servers to get a license and support for that Linux that is tied to the chassis, not to the individual servers inside the chassis.

The IBM BladeCenter chassis holds 14 of Big Blue's HS20 Xeon-based blade servers, its LS20 Opteron-based blades, or its JS20 PowerPC-based blades. All of them support Linux (and in the case of X64 blades, Windows, and PowerPC blades, AIX Unix), so this chassis-level pricing applies to all three of IBM's blade types. According to Juhi Jotwani, director of BladeCenter solutions at IBM, a one-year license to SLES 9 at the chassis level will cost $2,792, a savings of $6,854 compared to the cost of adding SLES 9 to a fully populated BladeCenter. A three-year license to SLES 9 at the chassis level will cost $6,988, yielding a savings of $17,100. This is serious money. Considering a configured blade server costs from $3,000 to $5,000, that is like being able to pay for anywhere from two to five blade servers out of the savings that would have been spent on SLES 9 licenses. Jotwani says that IBM worked out this arrangement with IBM to make it simpler for blade server customers to manage software licenses as well as to save them a little dough on the front end. The typical BladeCenter customer only half-populates a chassis, and it is probably not a coincidence that the crossover point where it makes sense to shift to chassis-level Linux licensing is around 7 to 8 blades.

Of course, having SLES 9 on such terms is just the beginning. Jotwani did not want to comment on whether Big Blue was pursuing a similar deal with Novell's rival, Red Hat, but eventually said that IBM was discussing the idea with Red Hat and other unnamed software makers. And there is more to chassis-level pricing than the operating system; there is all that other middleware and application software that runs atop those blades to consider. "We are working with other software providers to get them to pursue chassis-level software pricing," says Jotwani. "This is just the first example of what we think will be a shift in the marketplace." To that end, Jotwani is in talks with IBM's own Software Group to consider this new pricing, too.

Ed Anderson, vice president of product marketing at Novell, says that this is the first such chassis-level pricing agreement that either company has done to date, but adds that the deal was by no means exclusive for either party. "This agreement is completely non-exclusive," he says. "IBM can do a similar announcement with Red Hat, and we can do it with other blade server makers." Anderson says that IBM and Novell are still working out the final details on the SLES 9 pricing and that it would be ready some time in October. Anderson says that this chassis-level pricing was aimed at customers who were going whole-hog for blades. "This is targeted at customers who are using both Linux and blade servers in a very serious way," he says.

Both IBM and Novell thought the idea of rack-based pricing--for, after all, what is a blade server chassis but a server rack turned on its side with a networking backplane built in?--was an interesting one, but not one they wanted to consider right now. That said, in specific markets where customers are buying big racks of servers--Web hosting or high-performance supercomputer clusters come to mind--Novell already has special HPC pricing on SLES 9 licenses. A regular one-year license to the X86/X64 version of SLES 9 on a machine with 1 or 2 processor sockets costs $350, with a license for a machine that has from 2 to 16 sockets costing $899. Novell already has an HPC license that costs only $75 per node on the two-socket servers and only $150 on a machine with up to 16 sockets. However, the restriction for this HPC license is that it has to be used for Linux-based parallel supercomputer clusters. Novell doesn't require that customers prove they are using MPI or other HPC protocols to lash the nodes together; the company is trusting companies that they are doing what they say they are doing with the software.

IBM's rival, Hewlett-Packard, was quick to point out that it had inked a similar--but in some ways different--deal with Red Hat for its own BladeSystem blade servers at the LinuxWorld show in August. HP didn't talk about pricing when it made its announcement, so no one is under the impression that the HP-Red Hat bundle offers such deep discounts on Linux for BladeSystems. What HP did say back then was that Red Hat had been participating in HP's BladeSystem solution builder program, which helps vendors cook up best practices for deploying their solutions on HP's blade iron and integrating it with HP's System Insight Manager systems management tools. As a result of that collaboration, Red Hat tweaked its Red Hat Network support infrastructure and service to add a BladeSystem toolkit (Release 1.0) to help customers deploy the solution. This toolkit was available in September.