IBM Offers Summertime Deal On Power 740 Servers

September 10, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you are in need of some new processing capacity and you can’t wait for the forthcoming Power7+ servers to come to market later this year, then Big Blue has a deal on a Power 740 Express server that it wants to make–provided you get the deal done a week before the third quarter financials close so it can ship the box and book the revenue.

I don’t know why the Power 740 Summer Promotion did not come into my inbox with the other announcement letters on July 11, but in announcement letter 312-079 and subsequently modified in announcement letter 312-093 on July 31, IBM is giving customers who buy a Power 740 Express configuration (model number 8205-E6C, and that is one of the newer Power7 “Prime” machines with the PCI-Express 2.0 peripherals and the doubled up memory that came to market last October) a 25 percent discount if they buy specific configurations.

If you buy the Power 740 preconfigured with one processor card using 3.3GHz, 3.72GHz, or 3.55GHz processors with four, six, or eight cores activated (respectively) and a minimum of 16 GB of memory per core, you can lop off 25 percent off the sticker price before you start negotiating. (That’s from 64 GB to 128 GB in the machine.) And if you buy a Power 740 with two processor cards and put 24 GB per core into the box–that’s from 192 GB to 384 GB of total memory, depending on the processor option–then you can also lop off 25 percent off the list price as a starting point for negotiations. You can use 8 GB, 16 GB, or 32 GB memory sticks to build up the memory in the boxes–your choice.

Orders for the Power 740 Summer Promotion have to be in to IBM or your reseller partner by September 21. The discount applies to the entire box, not just the memory. I have only seen this deal in the United States and Canada thus far–and I barely saw it at that thanks to the fickle nature of the back-end systems that drive IBM’s announcements.

This is still nowhere close as good of a deal that PowerLinux customers are getting on memory, as I have explained at length. But it is better than a sharp stick in the teeth and a kick in the eye.