IBM Rejiggers V5 Rebate Deal, Includes PS Blades And Power7+ Entries

March 25, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

With the entry Power7+ systems shipping and the PS7XX series of blades using Power7 chips being the last of their line, it comes as no surprise that IBM has tweaked an on-again, off-again Power7 rebate deal.

The rebate deal aims to get customers using earlier generations of Power Systems iron with any of the releases in OS/400, i5/OS, IBM i V5 to move up to new Power7 iron and either IBM i 6.1 or 7.1. The last time this deal was updated was back in June 2012, when IBM put out a rule saying that with this rebate deal and a bunch of others you could not pass your rebate check to someone else. (I never assumed you could.)

With announcement letter 313-025, any vintage V5 box in the System i MXX or Power 5XX classes gets a rebate that varies depending not on the value of the machine being replaced, but based on the size and therefore cost of the box you are replacing it with. After the update, effective on March 18, the BladeCenter PS7XX blade servers, which are based on the Power7 processors, get a rebate of from $400 to $1,500 per V5 machine consolidated onto the box. And now Power 720+ and Power 740+ get a rebate that ranges between $400 and $2,000 per V5 machine replaced. The Power 720 and Power 740 machines using Power7 processors that were already covered by this deal, which had rebates of between $1,500 to $12,000, continue to have the same rebates they have for the past year.

The interesting bit as far as I am concerned is that the delta between the rebates given for Power7 and Power7+ machines sort of gives you an indication of what the premium is for moving to a new Power7+ machine in the same chassis and class. The rebates are deeper on the older iron, and that is because it has less performance and less scalability for memory and I/O. For one thing, IBM is not giving a discount on the Power 720+ machine with four cores running at 3.6 GHz. But if you go up to a six core, then the delta between the Power 720 using the 3.0 GHz Power7 and the Power 720+ using the 3.6 GHz Power7+ is $3,600. At the other end of the scale, for a two-socket Power 740 box using eight-core Power7 chips running at 3.55 GHz compared to a Power 740+ using eight-core Power7+ chips running at 4.2 GHz, the difference is $10,000.

By the way, you can transfer your IBM i license from the old machine to the new one and pay only an upgrade fee between the IBM i software release levels and tiers, as the case may be. This rebate deal says that it cannot be combined with other deals, but neither of us believe that, do we?