IBM Cuts Prices on Power 740 Storage and Smartie SSD and Servers

December 6, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It looks like some customers are balking at the prices that IBM is trying to charge for storage chassis and a new solid state disk-PCI-Express RAID controller bundle that aims to boost the throughput of Power7-based machines.

Just before the Thanksgiving holiday and just after I had already went to press with the prior issue of The Four Hundred, IBM said in announcement letter 310-295 that it was cutting the price on the feature 1135 integrated storage controller by 13.3 percent. This device is not a storage controller, but rather a 2U chassis with two dozen 300 GB disks that supports IBM i 6.1 or 7.1, as well as AIX or Linux. (The chassis does have integrated RAID controllers.) The price on that chassis, which comes populated with the disks, is now $32,441, or $4.51 per GB. The price was also cut on the Smart Analytics System SV2 model for the same chassis, which is built from Power 740 server nodes and which runs a collection of InfoSphere Warehouse, Cognos, and SPSS software to do business analytics processing. The Smartie machines are clusters based on x64, Power, and mainframe servers.

Speaking of the Smartie SV2 boxes, IBM also chopped the price of the PCI-RAID disk controller and solid state disk bundle used with this particular machine. I told you all about this bundle back in September, which pairs a PCI-Express 2.0 SAS controller with lots of bandwidth with four 177 GB SSDs made by SandForce for a total of 708 GB of storage and 120,000 I/Os per second of performance. IBM has a low-profile feature 2053 bundle for Power 710, 720, 730, and 740 servers that costs $20,654 and a regular-height version that costs $27,052. When IBM announced this back in September, knowing the costs were very high for SSDs, the company offered a package of that put together five of these controller/SSD bundles together for a 27.5 percent discount. Well, the Smartie box customers apparently said they wanted this price for onesies, and now IBM is selling single-units of these bundles on the Power 740-based Smartie SV2 clusters at the discounted price. That works out to $14,981 a pop, or $21.16 per GB, as you can see from this table:

	Machine	Feature		Purchase	Price	Percent
Machine Name	Type	Number	Description	Old	New	Change
Power 740 Express	8205	1135	Integrated Storage Controller	$37,439	$32,441	-13.3%
Smartie SV2	8493	1135	Integrated Storage Controller	$37,439	$32,441	-13.3%
Smartie SV2	8493	2057	PCI RAID + 4 x 177 GB SSD	$20,654	$14,981	-27.5%
Smartie SV2	8493	2058	PCI RAID + 4 x 177 GB SSD (LP)	$20,654	$14,981	-27.5%
Smartie SV2	8493	8942	Data Server	$72,828	$50,708	-30.4%
Smartie SV2	8493	8943	User Server	$72,828	$50,708	-30.4%
Smartie SV2	8493	8944	Failover Server	$72,828	$50,708	-30.4%
Smartie SV2	8493	8945	First User Server	$72,828	$50,708	-30.4%

You’ve known me a long time now, so what I am going to say next? Right! If customers buying Smartie boxes are getting the deal on onesies of the RAID/SSD bundle, then all customers regardless of platform should be getting that price. And it shouldn’t matter if they are getting the low-profile version or the regular version–the price should be the same.

IBM also announced that the Power 740 server nodes used in the Smartie SV2 box, which have two processors with a total of 16 3.55 GHz Power7 cores activated and 128 GB of memory, had their prices slashed by a stunning 30.4 percent, from $72,828 to $50,708. So what am I going to say here? Right again! A Power 750 running IBM i 7.1 is a smart system too and it is a preconfigured box too, and that means if you acquire one using those very expensive eight-core Power7 chips spinning at 3.55 GHz, then you deserve a wonking 30.4 percent discount before the negotiations even start, too.

SandForce SSDs Help Push TPC-C Performance for Power 780

A Peek Inside IBM’s Smart Analytics System

IBM Makes the Case for Power Systems SSDs

Sundry Spring Power Systems Storage Enhancements

Power Systems Finally Get Solid State Disks

IBM’s Smartie and Pizzazz Clusters–Still i-Less

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Tags: Tags: mtfh_rc, Volume 19, Number 43 -- December 6, 2010

Do the Math When Looking at IBM i Hosting for Cost Savings

COVID-19 has accelerated certain business trends that were already gaining strength prior to the start of the pandemic. E-commerce, telehealth, and video conferencing are some of the most obvious examples. One example that may not be as obvious to the general public but has a profound impact on business is the shift in strategy of IBM i infrastructure from traditional, on-premises environments to some form of remote configuration. These remote configurations and all of their variations are broadly referred to in the community as IBM i hosting.

“Hosting” in this context can mean different things to different people, and in general, hosting refers to one of two scenarios. In the first scenario, hosting can refer to a client owned machine that is housed in a co-location facility (commonly called a co-lo for short) where the data center provides traditional system administrator services, relieving the client of administrative and operational responsibilities. In the second scenario, hosting can refer to an MSP owned machine in which partition resources are provided to the client in an on-demand capacity. This scenario allows the client to completely outsource all aspects of Power Systems hardware and the IBM i operating system and database.

The scenario that is best for each business depends on a number of factors and is largely up for debate. In most cases, pursuing hosting purely as a cost saving strategy is a dead end. Furthermore, when you consider all of the costs associated with maintaining and IBM i environment, it is typically not a cost-effective option for the small to midsize market. The most cost-effective approach for these organizations is often a combination of a client owned and maintained system (either on-prem or in a co-lo) with cloud backup and disaster-recovery-as-a-service. Only in some cases of larger enterprise companies can a hosting strategy start to become a potentially cost-effective option.

However, cost savings is just one part of the story. As IBM i expertise becomes scarce and IT resources run tight, the only option for some firms may be to pursue hosting in some capacity. Whatever the driving force for pursing hosting may be, the key point is that it is not just simply an option for running your workload in a different location. There are many details to consider and it is to the best interest of the client to work with an experienced MSP in weighing the benefits and drawbacks of each option. As COVID-19 rolls on, time will tell if IBM i hosting strategies will follow the other strong business trends of the pandemic.

When we say do the math in the title above, it literally means that you need to do the math for your particular scenario. It is not about us doing the math for you, making a case for either staying on premises or for moving to the cloud. There is not one answer, but just different levels of cost to be reckoned which yield different answers. Most IBM i shops have fairly static workloads, at least measured against the larger mix of stuff on the public clouds of the world. How do you measure the value of controlling your own IT fate? That will only be fully recognized at the moment when it is sorely missed the most.

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Please visit ucgtechnologies.com/IBM-POWER9-systems for more information.

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