IBM Cuts Prices on System p 590 to 595 Upgrades

Published: August 23, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is always fairly quiet in the server space in August, and this year is no exception. But server makers still want to sell new systems and upgrades, and that means they want to tweak their prices here and there a bit to move iron.

This week, IBM tweaked the list price on its biggest System p Power5 and Power5+ servers to grease the sales skids a little. Specifically, IBM cut the price of converting from a single-frame p5 590 server, which supports a maximum of 32 Power5 or Power5+ cores, to a double-frame p5 595 server, which supports up to 64 cores, from $104,000 to $34,000. That's a pretty big price cut for the conversion in percentage terms--67 percent, to be precise--but in the overall scheme of things where an upgrade costs millions of dollars, it is pretty small potatoes.

It has now been more than a year since IBM has delivered the Power5+ variants of the System p 590 and 595 machines, which can support 2.1 GHz and 2.3 GHz cores. IBM is now shipping 4.7 GHz Power6 processors in the modified System p 570 server--which scales up to 16 cores and which is in the same rough performance class as a p5 590, too. Given these facts, it is a bit of a wonder that IBM is offering any kind of deals on p5 590 to 595 conversions; you would think IBM would be trying to get customers to move to the new Power6 machine, except for those who need more oomph than this box can provide. Customers might be antsy about using the tweaked version of AIX 5.3, and they might be nervous about being the first kid on the block using Power6 servers. Moreover, if a workload tops out on the new Power6 machine, there is no System p 690 or 695 box available yet to move into. So IBM has to offer customers a break of some sort to get them to buy something.

Last week, over on the System i side of the Power Systems division, IBM cut the price on base System i5 595 servers (with i5/OS Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition preconfigured on them) using the 2.3 GHz Power5+ processors by between 5.4 percent and 16.3 percent. The company also cut prices for upgrades from prior generations of big iSeries boxes to the 595s in parallel.

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