IBM Discounts BladeCenter 10 GE Switches Bought Online

February 21, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you have IBM‘s BladeCenter blade servers running either your Power or X64 workloads, or you are looking to move to blades, then Big Blue has a deal for you.

Last week, in announcement letter 311-021, IBM said that if you buy the latest 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches for your BladeCenter box, instead of holding back with only Gigabit Ethernet devices, and if you buy them online, and therefore save IBM the trouble of making a sales call, then it will give you a 40 percent discount off list price on selected switches that plug into the back of the chassis.

The deal, which runs until June 30, has a maximum limit of four switch modules, so don’t think you can go out there and create a gray market in switches and make lots of dough on the IT equipment market. The discount covers IBM’s own Blade Network 10-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch module, which is feature number 1639 in the various BladeCenter enclosures. The discount is also applicable to the feature 7656 converged 10 GE switch module from Brocade Communications. It is also available on the feature 2988 switch, which is the Catalyst 3110X switch module from Cisco Systems, which is a regular switch, and the Nexus 4001I, also from Cisco but offering converged server-storage networking.