IBM Cloud Storage And BRMS Get Subscription Pricing

January 22, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As you are well aware, Big Blue is in the middle of converting the IBM i software stack from perpetual software licensing and Software Maintenance pricing to straight-up subscription pricing. Now, subscription pricing has come to IBM Cloud Storage as well as to the venerable Backup, Recovery and Media Services for i (BRMS).

The new pricing was revealed in announcement letter AD23-0531, and it appears to be an option, not a requirement. Remember, for IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.5 themselves, perpetual licensing based on IBM i software tiers will only be available through the end of March of this year.

The legacy BRMS, as the announcement notes, is sold under the product number 5770-BR1 and is licensed for a physical server and based on the software tier, while the new subscription for BRMS is based on a processor core and is licensed under product number 5770-BR2. The subscription variant of BRMS is only available for IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.5, by the way, and it is slated to be available on January 26.

IBM Cloud Storage Solutions for i, which is known by product number 5733-ICC and which provides an IBM i native connection to various cloud storage services, notably the S3 object storage created by Amazon Web Services but not exclusive to that object storage. (You can find out more about Cloud Storage Solutions for i at this link and at this one, too.) The Base and Advanced feature sets for IBM Cloud Storage Solutions for i are included under a single purchase price, and it is Version 1.2 or later that will have this subscription price. The subscription for 5733-ICC will be available on February 16.

While IBM is offering subscription terms for both BRMS and IBM Cloud Storage Solutions for terms that span 90 days as well as those for one, two, three, four, or five years, the one thing the announcement letter did not include is the actual subscription price. That’s because, as an IBM representative explained to us, that customers are supposed to get pricing from partners and resellers. Well, that may be the practice, but for the many decades, IBM was compelled by law (thanks to the 1956 Consent Decree) and then by habit (after it expired for Power and mainframe iron in 2000) to provide pricing for hardware and software. And we think it should be doing this as a matter of course, and further that other IT vendors should do it, and more than that, list pricing should be required for all products sold to the public as a matter of law.

List prices provide a ceiling, and it is important to know what it is for anything we buy. We want to thank IBM for providing information on BRMS and IBM Cloud Storage pricing so we could provide some analysis on it. Rant over.

This data adds to the set of pricing we went over in The Subscription Pricing For The IBM i Stack So Far back in September last year.

We are well aware that IBM has always provided more pricing information than its rivals do, even if the practice is slipping.

Here is the pricing before and after for BRMS:

The Base and Advanced licenses for BRMS acquired under a perpetual license are cumulative, meaning you buy the Base license for a price, and then you activate Advanced functions in BRMS for an additional fee that is lower than the Base license but incremental just the same.

Here is how the perpetual license fee might be thought of as a subscription with a three year term. Software Maintenance for BRMS is included with IBM i SWMA, even though the BRMS license is not bundled with the IBM i license:

People tend to keep IBM i systems software licenses for more than three years, so the effective cost per core per year can be lower. But 36 months is a kind of normal crossover point historically for IBM software that was also sold under a monthly subscription. The effective price per core/year goes down as the years go on because BRMS maintenance for perpetual licenses is part of the IBM i SWMA. Given the cores shown, with five years of use, a perpetual license to BRMS effectively costs from $181 to $226 per core year.

Here is the pricing for IBM Cloud Storage for i:

We don’t have the separate SWMA for Cloud Storage when running on IBM i machines, which is not included in the IBM i SWMA. So we can’t try to work the perpetual license cost into an effective partition/year or core/year subscription price. But if you add the Base and Advanced feature prices together and assume a 20 percent SWMA rate over five years, then it costs about $1,300 per partition for the perpetual plus SWMA way of paying for Cloud Storage compared to $1,1015 for the actual subscription price just announced. So this Cloud Storage subscription appears to be less costly than the perpetual license to get the same software.

You will also note that IBM is charging $840 per core per year to license Cloud Storage for i to run on its Power Virtual Server (PowerVS) cloud infrastructure. This is not based on a partition, but on a core, and unless your partition is less than a core, the PowerVS price is more expensive than the subscription term price.

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