IBM Offers More Discounts on Power Servers

December 1, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

A few weeks ago, IBM offered customers using its AIX variants of its Power5, Power5+, and Power6 machines discounts on processor activations for installed iron, and offered customers with Power5 and Power5+ machines in the System p 590 and 595 machines discounts. These discounts were as high as 60 percent on older Power5 and Power5+ iron and 45 percent on Power6 iron. Now, customers buying new Power Systems iron with Power6 processors are being offered rebates to make a sale a bit easier to sell to upper management in a jittery economy.

On a Power Systems 570 machine (that’s a box with the 9117-MMA designation in the IBM catalog), rebates are available to customers ranging from $13,750 on a machine with eight 4.2 GHz Power6 cores to $37,000 for a fully activated 32-core Power 570 box with 5 GHz cores. IBM is offering rebates on 4.4 GHz and 5 GHz Power6 cores in the Power 570, and ironically, also is offering pretty decent rebates on a 570 box configured with 1.65 GHz Power5 chips (and only supporting AIX or Linux). Specifically, this older machine has a $14,300 rebate if customers activate all eight cores in a base box. The other machines can be configured with AIX 5.3 or 6.1, i 6.1, or Linux, by the way. And interestingly, rebates are not available on 4.4 GHz Power6 cores. (Go figure. Sounds like a yield issue if you ask me.)

On the big, bad Power Systems 595 machines, which span up to 64 processor cores in a single system image, Big Blue is also offering rebates to customers buying whole new boxes. (This machine is known as 9119-FHA in the IBM catalog.) And the rebates are only being offered on 4.2 GHz and 5 GHz Power6 cores that are activated in these machines. As with the Power 570s above, the more cores you activate and the faster the cores, the bigger the rebate. On a Power 595 with 24 cores activated running at 4.2 GHz, IBM is offering an $18,000 rebate, and on a 64-core machine using these cores, the rebate comes to $100,000; each incremental core between 24 and 64 yields a $4,000 rebate. On the 5 GHz variants, a 24-core setup gets a $21,000 rebate, while a 64-core setup gets a $122,000 rebate. Each incremental core gets a $5,000 rebate between the 24 to 64 core activations.

The Power 570 and 595 servers covered with this rebate deal can be equipped with AIX, i, or Linux, or a combination of any of these inside logical partitions. The rebates are being given for any machines that are acquired between November 25 and December 31. As has been the case for many years, IBM and its resellers apply the rebates instantly to the customers–business partners literally cut the check back to the customers and then get the money back from IBM after the deal is done. So you don’t have to sit around for a few months waiting for the rebate check to come back from IBM. The deal can also be applied to Power 570 and 595 machines that will be leased from IBM or a third-party lessor.

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