The Power And Storage Price Wiggling Continues – Again

September 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Here we go again . . . again. The people in charge of setting global prices for Power Systems and Storage products are rejiggering prices. In announcement letter AD25-1477, dated September 1 and effective on October 1, prices are changing in global markets due to changes in the foreign exchange rates between the United States and those countries.

To be specific, the following countries are seeing the following price changes:

Japan, 3.5 percent
India, 2.1 percent
Philippines, 1.4 percent
Hong Kong, 1.2 percent
New Zealand, 0.6 percent

The interesting bit is that back in early July, IBM had cut prices for Power Systems and Storage products in these five countries as well as 18 others by between 1 percent to 9.9 percent.

The price changes affect Power9 and Power10 systems as well as the full complement of flash, disk, and tape storage sold by IBM around the world. The full set of hardware that are affected by this price decrease is listed in this spreadsheet, which you can download for a looksee.

Long gone are the days when we can easily look up the prices for Power Systems and related gear. IBM’s configuration tools tie customer accounts to machine configurations, and that has been the case for a long time. We used to be able to look up features and keep track of price changes for you as well as just get current prices whenever that was useful.

We think that all vendors of all products should have to provide vendor list pricing. This provides a ceiling on pricing, which is why we have always given out list pricing. In recent years, we started discounting, but the discounts are based strictly on volumes, and those discounted prices are published, too. Oracle is the only vendor we know that faithfully gives out prices for its hardware, software, and services like Big Blue used to do. The big cloud builders and their neocloud offspring also provide pricing – and all of them like to have their prices trend down over time, and intentionally so. This stands in stark contrast to what IBM is doing with Power Systems and Storage pricing, which goes up and down like Bitcoin or barometric pressure here in the mountains.

Also, in announcement letter AD25-1110, IBM is pulling the plug on a bunch of features for Power Systems. The important ones are the PCI-Express 3.0 cryptographic co-processors, which have a slew of feature code numbers and which are being withdrawn in China only. (No explanation is given. Perhaps the Chinese government is not keen on cryptography it cannot break?) Nvidia (Mellanox) ConnectX-6 network interface cards that have cryptography are also being pulled from the Power Systems catalog in China. Both are withdrawn effective August 26.

In that same announcement, differential DIMM DDR4 memory cards used in Power9 and Power10 machines that come in 32 GB, 64 GB, 128 GB, 256 GB capacities as well as in 512 GB and 1,024 GB bundles of multiple features are being withdrawn for Power S1012, Power S1022, Power L1022, and Power S1024 machines. These DDR4 DDIMM memory features won’t be sold starting January 1, 2026. Other features are also being withdrawn, but nothing major.

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