IBM Offers Trade-Ins On Storage To Grease The Upgrade Skids

April 6, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Business partners who want to help customers upgrade their flash storage are pleased that Big Blue has updated a long running trade-in program for various flash, disk, and tape storage products.

As we previously reported, IBM has just revamped the FlashSystem all-flash array lineup, with the idea of helping customers make-do in a market where prices of main memory and flash memory have all skyrocketed because of exuberant demand on behalf of the hyperscalers, cloud builders, and AI model builders who are all trying to build gigawatt-scale systems to create better models and higher performance inference engines to turn them into money.

The memory and flash price increases have been unprecedented, and to a certain extent unexpected, because only a little more than two years ago both main and flash memory were both in a slump, with too much capacity and not enough demand, resulting in falling prices. Effective April 1, IBM jacked up prices on main and flash memory, with main memory prices up 55 percent on four-way, eight-way, and 16-way NUMA Power10 and Power11 machines and up by 30 percent on single-socket and dual-socket Power10 and Power11 machines. Compared to the market at large, this is a fairly modest increases. Flash memory prices are all over the place, with flash storage used internally on Power Systems servers up from a low of 4 percent to a high of 145 percent for various flash features. Inside of DS8000 and FlashSystem arrays, flash prices rose by 30 percent to 35 percent – again, not that bad compared to the market at large. (IBM was already charging a premium is my guess.) For Ceph and Fusion HCI arrays, the price increases were several hundreds of a percent, which means IBM was charging artificially low prices here and has to balance it back out against the market.

The update to the storage trade-in deal, which was announced to business partners last week, now allows for partners to peddle FlashSystem 5600, 7600, and 9600 arrays and get trade-ins for customers. Sales of DS8000 model 5341-A00 and 5341-A08 arrays as well as Elastic Storage System 3500 5147-102 arrays (which run IBM’s GPFS parallel file system for HPC and AI applications) are now eligible under the trade-in. The TS7780 Virtual Tape is also added. These are the new machines that you can buy; you get trade-ins on the old stuff you give back to IBM.

IBM is taking FlashSystem 5300, 7300, and 9500 arrays as trade-ins and has also boosted the trade-ins on the FlashCore Module 4.0 flash modules. IBM was giving customers a $500 trade-in on FCM 3.0 modules, but now on the FCM 4.0 modules used in the FlashSystem 5300s, it is 3X that ($1,500 a pop), on the FlashSystem 7300 it is 4X that (or $2,000 per module), and on the FlashSystem 9500 it is 5X that (or $2,500 each).

There is a complicated algorithm for calculating the total trade-in payment that customers will see and the trade-in values for the old machines overall. On a deal replacing a small FlashSystem 5300 with a shiny new FlashSystem 5600, the trade-in payment to customers was $6,000, on a medium on it was $13,200, and on a large one it was $20,400. For whatever reason, the total trade-in allowances for these deals were larger – perhaps if you are buying more capacity, you get a better deal? It was not clear. On deals replacing a FlashSystem 7300 with a FlashSystem 7600, a small configuration had a trade-in payment to customers of $14,400, a medium configuration had a trade-in payment of $20,400, and a large configuration had a payment of $27,600. Again, the total trade-in allowance was much larger than these numbers – more than double for the small configuration, more than triple for the medium configuration, and nearly quintuple for the large configuration.

Partners have to use a trade-in calculator to figure this all out. Once an invoice is issued to the customer, the trade-ins are locked in.

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