Big Blue Sneaks Out Power Systems Price Changes
December 5, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Here at The Four Hundred, we keep pretty religious track of IBM‘s weekly announcements, which historically have come out on Tuesday mornings around 9 a.m. Eastern. But over the years, Big Blue has been wandering from its traditional announcement days, launching things any old day and often not in conjunction with the actual announcement to the press for a new product. And, this year, IBM has put a new front end on its customer resource system that seems to have a mind of its own. That’s the excuse we are using for why we didn’t see some Power Systems price changes that took effect on October 11 in announcement letter 311-133. IBM cut the price of the USB drives for Power Systems machines. Feature 1106, which is a 160 GB removable disk drive, now costs $200, down 36.5 percent, and the feature 1107 removable disk, which weighs in at 500 GB, now costs $295, down 62.9 percent. These removable disks are available for Power 550, 560, 710, 720, 740, 750, 770, and 780 machines. On the Power740 and the Smart Analytics System cluster built from it, IBM has also cut the price on the feature 1135 integrated storage controller, which an enclosure that has enough slots to hold out to 24 SAS drives. IBM cut the price on this enclosure by 8.2 percent, to $26,843. Given the state of the disk drive market right now thanks to the flooding in Thailand, IBM may think twice about these price cuts and reverse them at some point. Or street price could even rise above list price. In IBM Europe announcement letter A11-1062, IBM revealed price changes on various feature conversions, migrations, and upgrades in the former AS/400, iSeries, RS/6000, and pSeries product lines, effective November 24. The changed prices cover the Integrated X Series co-processor for vintage machines and reach all the way back to the original B series generations of AS/400s all the way up to the Power5+ M series machines from five years ago. Here’s the one thing we don’t know: How the prices changed. Given the state of the economy and the scarcity of these old features, I can’t believe prices have gone down. But you never know.
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