Sundry Power Systems And PureSystems Announcements

September 30, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is the fall, and in fact, this is the end of the third quarter, so if there is going to be some wheeling and dealing so IBM can turn in a good finish to 2013, I would expect that to start this week. That said, Big Blue tweaked a few things here and there that you should be aware of before the fourth quarter push gets underway.

First, in announcement letter 213-434, you will see that IBM has updated the PureApplication System W1500 machines, which are clusters based on Intel‘s Xeon processors, and the W1700 machines, which are clusters based on IBM’s own Power processors. This announcement letter is basically devoid of information that tells you precisely what IBM changed, but you need to know that something changed if you are in the middle of a deal. Hence, that is why I bring it up. I have asked IBM for an explanation of what precisely has changed and am still awaiting a response. My guess? The X86 versions have been updated for the latest “Ivy Bridge-EP” Xeon E5-2600 v2 processors and the Power versions have been updated with the Power7+ processors.

In announcement letter 313-090, IBM is tweaking the IBM i Capacity BackUp (CBU) with PowerHA deal, which gives customers who buy a CBU-designated Power Systems machine and a license to IBM’s PowerHA SystemMirror for i clustering software a rebate that ranges from $1,000 to $3,000, depending on the size of the CBU that you buy. You have to license the Standard Edition of PowerHA SystemMirror for i. With the update, IBM is adding Power 720+ and Power 740+ CBU machines using the Power7+ processor to the mix at the low end and Power 750+ and Power 760+ machines in the midrange that are based on the Power7+ chip as well. The older Power7 CBUs in the Power 720 and 740 line are still available under the deal, but the Power 750 is not. The deal, which was last changed in December 2012, already had Power7 and Power7+ processor options in Power 770 and Power 780 bigger iron.

IBM continues to monkey around with memory prices on its Flex System Xeon-based server nodes for the PureSystems family of machines. In announcement letter 313-088, it looks like most regular DDR3 memory prices went down by between 12 and 30 percent, but prices on low-voltage DDR3 memory looks like it went up by 10 to 12 percent. Memory prices for Power-based Flex nodes were unchanged in this announcement. Prices for hot-plug disks for local storage on the nodes were also cut by 6 to 14 percent.