IBM Kills Off Entry Power Server Hardware Subscription, Old Features

August 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Big Blue has been talking about offering a complete IBM system, including hardware, software, and support, as a single offering and under a single price, for more than two years now. The company talked about it back in July 2022, and we got the full scoop on pricing on the IBM i System Subscription, the first instantiation on the Power S1024 server, back in September 2022.

This looked like the wave of the future, with a single per user cost of around $50 per month per user for a machine, which as we pointed out at the time, is less costly than a data plan on a smartphone. Well, wave goodbye. Because on August 13, IBM withdrew the IBM i System Subscription offering. You can read all about it – what little Big Blue said, that is – in announcement letter AD24-0634.

We were in the throes of COVID-19, which is still admittedly a pretty bad cold that made us a little spacey last week, so we didn’t see this until we were working on The Four Hundred over the weekend, so we cannot get an explanation from IBM why this was withdrawn. We will reach out today to IBM and see if we can get an answer. All that the announcement letter says, aside from a full list of all of the features for the subscription-priced Power S1014 being withdrawn, is that the replacement product is IBM i offered under subscription pricing plus Power Virtual Server in the cloud or Power Virtual Server Private Cloud on premises. We wrote about the latter and the new managed services overlay for it back on May 22. Both the public and private versions of PowerVS use the same control plane and tooling to manage virtual compute, memory, networking, and storage capacity, but the latter does it on machines running in your datacenter rather than on cloud instances exposed as PowerVS instances on IBM’s infrastructure.

We don’t know how this latter approach will provide subscription pricing for the hardware, even if it does for managed services and the operating system stack.

We still hope that IBM will be able to provide subscription pricing across the Power Systems hardware line, much as rivals Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, and Cisco Systems are all doing with their server platforms.

In related hardware withdrawal news, on July 9, in announcement letter AD24-0663, IBM says that on December 31, it will withdraw the processor activation and memory activation features on the Power9 family of machines. The PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor and the IBM i 7.1 core activations are also going to withdrawn at the same time. For some reason, the withdrawal date for these features, which is the final nail in the coffin of the Power9 machinery, is extended to October 31, 2025, in China and South Korea.

Finally, also on August 13, in announcement letter AD24-0604, IBM said that it would stop selling various PCI-Express adapters and NVM-Express flash cards and drives as well as cables for Power Systems machines between now and early October. Many of these features were used on Power9 gear, which is why they are being withdrawn, but some of them are for Power10 machinery and have been superceded by more modern alternatives. There is a very long list of features, so if you think you might need legacy devices to build out your systems, see if any of these apply to you.

This Issue Sponsored By

Table of Contents

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search