IBM Offers Storwize Virtualization Software Freebie Deal

November 3, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In case you haven’t noticed it, IBM thinks that its Storwize disk and sometimes disk/flash hybrid arrays are a pretty hot commodity. If Big Blue had its way, IBM i shops would adopt Storwize arrays as their primary or “tier one” storage and pay for lots of extra software goodies on them, such as compression or automatic data tiering, to make them a lot more useful, and importantly, to help IBM make some extra money on software with a recurring subscription.

The deal in question is at the moment only available in Australia and New Zealand as far as I can identify and is detailed in announcement letter A314-071 and announcement letter NZ314-071. Under the IBM System Storage V7000 External Data Virtualization offer, customers who want to use their Storwize V7000 arrays as a front-end data virtualization platform for other disk arrays can get up to five licenses to do so for free if they acquire a new V7000 array. This deal applies to feature code 5639-EB7 in the Storwize software stack as well as feature 5639-E8JQ, which is a Software Maintenance contract for the external storage device for a one year term.

This promotion is valid between October 22 and December 31, and as I point out, if a deal is available anywhere in the world, then it should be available everywhere in the world. I cannot find pricing for this feature in Australia and New Zealand, but in the United States, the external virtualization feature costs $6,000 per enclosure it covers aside from the actual V7000 it runs on and the one year support contract costs $1,500. So that represents a maximum value of around $37,500 if the deal was available in the United States and if the customer wanted the Storwize storage virtualization software to span an extra five non-Storwize enclosures.

The Storwize V7000s were just updated in May to a scale-out storage cluster that spans up to 4 PB of capacity, which is a lot for an IBM i shop. But there are some big IBM i customers. And importantly, there are some big shops with mixed IBM i, AIX, Linux, and Windows workloads and even with other disk arrays that can have all of the data managed by the Storwize V7000 and then accessible to all of the servers.

Incidentally, the lower-end Storwize V5000 array has this same external data virtualization option, but its software licenses are not being given away as freebies Down Under as far as we can tell from IBM’s announcement database.