IBM Adds Deals And Tools To Cloudy Power Service
May 18, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In February last year, Big Blue surprised many of us by announcing that it was putting Power8 and Power9 systems onto the IBM Cloud and offering up true cloud capacity, with utility pricing, for the capacity on Power S922 entry and Power E880 high-end servers. We did a detailed analysis of the Power Systems Virtual Server for IBM Cloud offering here, and talked about the pricing for compute, storage, and networking for the service there. The offering was first available in June of last year, and subsequently the Power E980 has been added to the mix.
Now, we have caught wind of a special deal IBM is offering to IBM i and AIX customers looking to be among the first to try out the service, and we have also found out about new software from the IBM i stack that is available on the Power Virtual Server offering, including its pricing.
But first, a quick refresher on the Power Systems Virtual Server for IBM Cloud service:
OK, so now onto the 20 for 2 deal, as IBM is calling it when it talks about it with business partners and resellers, which is outlined here:
Aside from the line about making “your clients stickier,” which we thought was funny because it is late at night here as we write this, this sounds like a good promotion to get customers to really try the cloudy Power iron out for realsies. IBM is offering $20,000 credits for the first two months of their service, plus IBM expert assistance, to the first 100 companies across all of its geographies so it can get good at running Power in the cloud and gather up some AIX and IBM i case studies. Why IBM is not making these deals broadly known – we found out about this through a reseller, and there are no customer announcement letters about the 20 for 2 deal – is a mystery to us. Maybe IBM needs to, I dunno, buy some ads in The Four Hundred? We can help get those customers, you know, with stories such as this one, for example. As far as we know, this deal kicked off in the second half of 2019 but it is still open and being promoted as of this week by the master resellers to their downstream partners.
Resellers were also told two weeks ago that three programs for IBM i are now available on the Power Systems Virtual Server for IBM Cloud service, as follows:
And here are those links in the presentation, made live, which are useful:
- Power Systems Virtual Server Release Notes
- IBM i Licensing in the Power Virtual Server for IBM Cloud
- Power Systems Virtual Server Pricing Plans
In the second document listed in those bullets, you will see that Db2 Web Query for i is up next. You cannot, as yet, bring your own licenses instead of renting them new from Big Blue, but we hear from informed sources that IBM will eventually allow this capability.
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Hello Thomas, glad to see the interest! My name is José Paez and I’m one of the offering leaders in IBM bringing this functionality to market. I’d like to set up some time with you to go over some points from the article to flesh out some more information. If you could please email me at Jose.paez@ibm.com, I can carve out some time for us to discuss.