Not April Fools: More Price Increases For Power Systems Coming

March 10, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM is at it again, raising prices for parts of the Power Systems stack and related hardware and software technologies often used with the platform.

In announcement letter AD25-0860, which came out on March 3, Big Blue raised prices on various Power Systems and storage products and across various geographic regions.

Another part of the price change was to rebalance against the U.S. dollar foreign exchange rate. IBM did a similar price harmonization across geographies in November 2011, and then did it again on September 3. In the latest announcement, eighteen different currencies in the Asia/Pacific and EMEA regions saw price increases for various gear (which we will explain in a moment). The currencies and regions affected, as well as the price increases, are as follows:

New Zealand Dollar, 4 percent
Canadian Dollar, 3.1 percent
Indonesia Rupiah, 2.9 percent
Indian Rupee, 2.9 percent
Australia Dollar, 2.8 percent
South Korea Won, 2.7 percent
Norway Kroner, 2.6 percent
Euro, 2.3 percent
Denmark, 2.2 percent
Switzerland Franc, 2.2 percent
Great Britain Pound, 2 percent
Morocco Dirham, 2 percent
China, 1.3 percent
Sri Lanka, 1.2 percent
South Africa Rand, 1.2 percent
Czech Koruna, 1.1 percent
Brunei Dollar, 0.7 percent
Singapore Dollar, 0.7 percent

The price increases apply to the Power E950, the Power E1050, and the Power E980, but not the Power E1080, in the “scale up” part of the Power Systems lineup. For the so-called “scale out” machines – what you and I would probably call entry and midrange machines – the foreign exchange normalization price increases shown above apply to the Power S914, Power H922, Power S1012, Power L1022, and Power S1024 machines. The Hardware Management Console, the S42 rack, and the 7316 rack monitor and keyboard also see the price increases above. Private Cloud capacity credits and Power Virtual Server Private Cloud capacity also gets the increase,

In addition, various FlashSystem and Storwize storage arrays, high-end DS8000 series arrays, and a slew of enterprise tape drives and libraries also see the foreign exchange normalization increase.

These price changes go into effect on April 1 – no joke! – and we presume that these are added to any existing price changes that have already gone into effect or are announced and soon will go into effect.

In the same announcement, IBM is also increasing shipping and handling charges for Power Systems iron by 13 percent; on IBM storage, the shipping and handling charges price increases range from a low of 17 percent to a high of 232 percent, with an average of 45.1 percent across a very wide range of products. IBM’s 3588 LTO tape drives also get an 11 percent increase, with the LTO 8 Fibre Channel tape drive now costing $44,766, the LTO 9 Fibre Channel tape drive now costing $53,735, and the LTO 9 SAS tape drive now costing $54,923. Tape media for these LTO devices has a 6 percent price hike, and HA clustering software for Storwize arrays has a 90 percent price increase.

As we said back in December, when a second set of price hikes were announced on different features in the Power Systems and storage lines, it is very hard to figure out what current prices will be after the latest price hikes since these changes are all cumulative and multiplicative. Just about everything had a 6 percent increase last September, and then some additional tweaks for foreign exchange in December. It is very difficult to compile all of this pricing information. Even partners can’t see the whole Power Systems price list like they used to be able to do. (And we were able to see, too.) We miss the days of pricing transparency, and it is a pity that more pricing information is not widely available across the IT sector so customers can see what it costs to build a system. But, then again, that is precisely the point. Pricing is only known at any given time for a very specific deal with a qualification from a business partner in a precise deal.

What we can say is that things are getting more expensive, and that is before tariffs have kicked in on all kinds of components and finished gear, which will have their own effects and which will probably cause another wave of price inflation. We shall see.

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