IBM Gives Big Discounts on Opteron Servers and VMware Hypervisors

October 13, 2008 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.

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