IBM Offers Freebie Flex System Chassis To Pump Up PureSystems

November 11, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As The Four Hundred told you two weeks ago, Big Blue has just put out a new bundle of Flex System converged iron and the IBM i operating system using a Flex p260+ node designed especially for entry IBM i shops. Now, IBM is giving a deal on the underlying Flex System chassis to sweeten the deal a bit more.

In announcement letter 313-113, IBM is offering two models of the Flex System chassis and their power supplies, power cables, and breakout cables at a very steep discount. How does 100 percent grab you?

IBM’s Flex System chassis, front view.

The deal, announced on November 8, will run through March 31, 2014. The chassis is a 10U enclosure that has room for seven double-wide server nodes or 14 single-side server nodes; you can also slide in a variant of the Storwize V7000 disk array for storage for the server nodes. The base Flex System Enterprise Chassis currently costs $5,589 if you buy it online, and with two 2,500 watt power supplies, two power cables, and breakout cable costs $6,794. With two 2,100 power supplies and the cables, the chassis costs $6,594.

There is a catch to the deal, as there often is. In this case, the chassis has to be the first one in its physical location to get the deal. There is a two chassis limit, and you can put them in one location within the company or put them in two different facilities.

The PureSystems for IBM i bundle costs $124,038 without any reseller or IBM discount. That machine has one chassis, one p260+ node with four cores, an x240 node with two Xeon E5 processors, and a Flex System Manager node. The setup also sports a V7000 array with 2.4 TB of capacity and all of the Storwize software loaded up, and the p260+ has IBM i 7.1 on one core. Let’s assume you can get this for maybe 15 percent off, or even 20 percent because it is the fourth quarter and IBM is eager to make its numbers. That’s $99,230. Now, take off the cost of the chassis under this first-in-location deal and you are down to $92,600. That brings another 5 points of discount to the deal, for 25 percent off.