IBM Cuts A PureFlex Deal With Service Providers

February 24, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Managed service providers who are looking to build public clouds based on Power Systems and X86 servers can now get PureFlex machines from IBM at a significantly reduced price.

The discount deal, which is detailed in announcement letter 314-017, is similar to a deal IBM gave to MSPs back in December 2012 for various Power Systems machines, including Power-based blade servers. The BladeCenter machines are basically in mothballs now, and have been replaced by PureFlex converged infrastructure. And thus the new MSP deal is focused on PureFlex machinery and the systems software that runs on it. This includes both Power and X86 iron this time around, however.

Specifically, discounts are available on the PureFlex rack (38 percent off) and the Flex System chassis (37 percent off) that the server nodes slide into. The MSPs are getting a deal on the original two-socket Flex p260 node (based on the Power7 chip and 37 percent off) as well as on the p260+ node (which uses the Power7+ chip and is available at 38 percent off). Two other nodes announced last August with the p260+ include the p270+, a double-stuffed two-socket Power7+ node with 24 cores per processor card, and the p460+, a quad-socket card using the Power7+ chip, are also available under the MSP deal. The p270+ has a 37 percent discount and the p460+ has a much deeper 50 percent price cut for MSPs. The Flex x220, x222, x240, and x440 node based on Intel‘s Xeon processors are available with discounts ranging from 37 percent to 54 percent.

Under this MSP deal, licenses for AIX and IBM i are sold to cloud builders with a 60 percent discount, as is licenses to the PowerVM hypervisor and the Flex System Manager, which controls all of the server, storage, and switching inside the converged system, and Software Maintenance for AIX and IBM i.

These hardware discounts are, generally speaking, not as steep as with the original deal covering blade and rack servers from 2012, which had a 55 percent discount on Power 7XX blades and Power 720 and Power 740 rack machines and a 65 percent discount on Power 770 iron. The software discounts remain the same at 60 percent off.