IBM Kills Off a Bunch of Power Trade-In Deals

March 7, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you were hoping to use some of the long-running and often-modified Power Systems trade-in deals to make your acquisition of a new Power7 server a little more palatable to the bean counters, forget it.

In late February, IBM ceased three different trade-in programs aimed at Power Systems shoppers.

The first one, last modified in announcement letter 310-290 and nuked on February 22 in announcement letter 311-022, gave customers buying specific Power6, Power6+, or Power7 systems trade-in credits on IBM and non-IBM gear if they turned over that gear to Big Blue. The credits were never that great–ranging from $200 to $12,000 on machines that can cost 50 to 100 times that configured. The credits were, in theory, based on the trade-in value of IBM Power-based servers (both in the AS/400 and RS/600 families) as well as Unix gear from Oracle and Fujitsu as well as proprietary and Unix gear from Hewlett-Packard.

In announcement letter 311-023, also dated February 22, IBM has put a trade-in deal relating to Power 570, 770, and 780 deals on ice, which was last modified in September 2010 in announcement letter 310-259. Under this deal, customers replacing older Power-based machines with Power6, Power6+, or Power7 machines bearing those 570, 770, and 780 designations got trade-ins that ranged from $750 to $40,000. The amounts of the trade-ins depending on the configuration of the replaced and replacement boxes.

Finally, the Power 595 and 795 server trade in, which was also last changed in November 2010 with announcement letter 310-288, is being sent to the great trash bin in the Intertubes with announcement letter 311-024 as of February 22. This deal offered trade-ins ranging from $7,000 to $120,000 if they got a Power 595 or Power 795 machine, replacing IBM Power machines of earlier vintage or RISC/Itanium gear from Oracle/Sun, Fujitsu, or HP.

You may be wondering why sometimes The Four Hundred often takes a week or two to report on these deals as they are announced and changed. The answer is the IBM iSource announcement system is crazy. Sometimes, the email notifications we receive don’t have announcements in them that eventually pop up in the online system after the fact. Yeah, I know computers are not supposed to do this. When we see stuff, we write stuff.