What Do Secondhand Power9 Machines Cost These Days?
March 25, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Before IBM consolidated its Global Asset Recovery Services arm in the Systems group in the wake of the spinout of the Kyndryl outsourcing and services business, we could go out to the IBM web site every now and then and get a sense of what secondhand Power Systems machinery cost. But alas, that is no longer the case.
And so, we went poking around the Internet late on a Friday night and stumbled across our old friends at Data Tech Computer Services in Alpharetta, Georgia, which have been in business nearly three decades peddling AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i. And as far as we know, Ann Dayton is still in charge, and good heavens, it has been 17 years since we talked to her about the used equipment market.
We will rectify that soon, particularly with the Power8 machines being sunsetted and many customers trying to figure out if they should upgrade to a Power9 machine or buy a new Power10 system. But in the meantime, we combed the Data Tech site for its current street prices for secondhand Power9 machinery to give you a sense of what base systems cost. Take a look:
Most of the machines shown have been stripped down to 32 GB or 64 GB of main memory, a nominal amount of disk or flash storage, four 1 Gb/sec Ethernet ports, and a single core activated running IBM i, and it looks like IBM i 7.4 is the preferred operating system release on these secondhand boxes.
You will note as well that the price of a machine has as much to do with its expandability as it does with the base amount of CPWs that are available to run workloads. The more expansion potential a Power9 machine has, the more the base system cost is on the secondhand market. IBM is still selling core activations for Power9 machines, so it is relatively easy and relatively inexpensive to add cores for running IBM i workloads. Adding IBM i licenses to those cores will be problematic on P05 and P10 machines after May 7, which Big Blue is shifting to subscription licenses for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5 on Power9 and Power10 machines. But on the P20-class machines, IBM will still be selling perpetual licenses plus Software Maintenance until further notice.
You can reach Data Tech Computer Services here if you are thinking about getting a secondhand Power9 machine instead of a new Power10 box, or if you have excess Power Systems gear that you want to get rid of and cash in on.
We will try to find other pricing on Power9 machinery and report back what we find.
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Thank you for spotlighting Data Tech in this article. Yes, Ann is still running our team here and have continued to grow under her leadership. This year, we added another sales associate to our team to keep the level of service we provide. My name is Robert Knutson and I manage our website (alongside Andrew Knutson). This article caught us at the beginning of an maintenance project. My first task is to update our pricing. We should be finished with system pricing by the end of this week. Feel free to reach out with any questions. My email is rknutson@datatechcomputer.com.