IBM Offers PureFlex Power-X86 Deal Down Under

October 22, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The rack is the new blade server chassis, in case you haven’t noticed. Big Blue launched the PureFlex systems in April, and it wants these machines to do battle against the converged systems stacks that Cisco Systems, Dell, Oracle, and Hewlett-Packard have put into the field.

Some companies are so used to having multiple vendors providing servers, storage, and networking that the idea of buying them all from one vendor, and making such a commitment to a single platform, is a little bit scary. (Not so much for System/36, System/38, AS/400, and Power Systems shops, of course.) To help peddle the PureFlex modular systems down under in Australia and New Zealand, the company is offering a special deal on starter X86 PureFlex setups as well as on hybrid X86-Power setups. IBM has not published list prices on configured PureFlex iron, so it is a bit hard to say how good of a deal the Aussies and Kiwis are getting. And the reason we bring it up at all is that no matter where you are, you should be asking for at least the same treatment.

The deal in New Zealand is outlined in announcement letter NZ312-137 and in Australia in announcement letter A312-137.

For those wanting to get a PureFlex setup with only Xeon E5-based nodes, the base setup for this deal is two Flex x240 nodes, each with six-core Xeon E5s running at 2GHz with an unspecified amount of memory and two 300GB disks. The Flex entry chassis is in the rack to hold these half-width server nodes, and the Flex System Manager node is also in the rack with one year of subscription and support for that PureFlex control freak. IBM is also tossing in a Storwize V7000 disk array with 1.5TB of disk capacity and a subscription to the Smart Cloud Entry cloud control freak with one year of support. The setup includes three days of lab services and three days of microcode analysis per year, performed by IBM’s techies. In New Zealand, this setup costs $102,599 in Kiwi dollars, and in Australia it costs $83,000 in Aussie dollars. That price also includes the new 42U PureFlex rack.

If you want to toss in a two-socket Flex p260 server node using four-core Power7 processors and the same iron, the price in New Zealand for this PureFlex configuration is $131,199 in Kiwi dollars and is $106,099 in Aussie dollars.

Neither price includes sales taxes. You have to place your order before December 24 to get this pricing, and the box has to ship before December 31 so IBM can book the sale in the fourth quarter.

Given how server sales were down in the third quarter, I am amazed IBM is not cutting more deals in its announcements. Perhaps it is doing such deals on a one-on-one basis, but that is an inefficient way to get it done across hundreds of thousands of potential customers.