Old Gear Gets The Ax In More Power Systems Trade-In Deals

June 27, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you were thinking that you might be able to combine some of IBM‘s trade-in deals to get your hands on older Power Systems machines, think again. IBM is continuing to sift through its deal books and removing just about everything that doesn’t have a Power7 chip embedded in it.

I say just about because the Power6-based high-end Power 595 server seems to be, for the moment, immune from the scissors, as was the case in the modified deal I told you about two weeks ago. But all the other Power6 and Power6+ based gear in the deal was chopped.

And so it is with two more deals that Big Blue modified last week. In announcement letter 311-083, the rejiggered Software Solutions for IBM Power Systems Competitive Migration Rebate Offering, dated June 22, no longer provides rebates for JS23 and JS43 blade servers or Power 520 or Power 550 rack and tower servers. The other change with this announcement is that Unit4 and its CODA financial suite are now added to the list of supported packages from independent software vendors whose products can be acquired under the rebate deal. IBM removed Sterling Commerce, which it bought last year, from the ISV list since it is, by definition, a dependent software vendor. There are 131 software vendors that are currently part of this rebate deal, which gives those who move an existing set of applications to a new Power Systems iron rebates that range from a low of $500 on a four-core PS700 blade server to $140,000 on a full-blown, 256-core Power 795. Interestingly, the rebates on older Power 595s run as high as $200,000 for a full 64-core machine, which means IBM has these sitting in the barn somewhere (probably in Poughkeepsie, New York) and wants to get rid of them.

In announcement letter 311-084, IBM has also modified a parallel deal called the Software Solutions for IBM Power Systems First-in-Location Rebate Offering, which covers the same machines and gives the same rebates to customers buying new software modules from ISVs and putting them on new Power7-based machines or those Power 595s that it is trying to get rid of.

Given the cost of the configured Power Systems in question–from several tens of thousands of dollars for entry machines with their software installed to many millions of dollars for Power 595s and Power 795s–these rebates are pretty tiny. But, they do sweeten the deal a little, and that is something. My advice is to press hard for deeper discounts and then ask for this rebate.