IBM Announcements: Service Price Hikes, HANA Iron As A Service, Rust for AIX And Maybe PASE, And More. . .

February 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

When Big Blue makes big announcements, we break them down and analyze them uniquely. But there are often a lot of little things that happen over the course of a few weeks, and we like to lump these together and give you the rundown. That way you are informed, but you can skim it.

So let’s take a look the things related to Power Systems and IBM i that have happened in the past few weeks since we last did this. Let’s start with a few price changes.

In announcement letter AD25-0140, dated February 3 and effective on March 1, IBM is raising prices on its Power Expert Care services for the Power E980 system. Customers running AIX and IBM i operating systems on their Power E980s with Power Expert Care tech support will see a 15 percent increase and those running SAP HANA on Linux on this machine will see a 35 percent increase. For companies on an auto-renew contract with Big Blue that come due on May 30 or later will see the price change hot when they renew. That SAP HANA customers are seeing such a big price increase suggests one of two things. One, IBM is feeling pretty comfortable as the only real system supplier in the world that can build big memory systems, or two, the pricing for this handholding support for HANA was artificially low to attract new customers, and now Big Blue wants to cash in a little on the engineering costs it has on creating and supporting big HANA boxes. It could be both.

In announcement letter AD25-0138, also dated February 3 and effective March 1, Proactive Support Healthchecks for the ancient to current Power Systems and their its integrated storage have their prices increased by 4 percent to 4,652 percent, depending on the feature and the country. The exchange rate with Turkey has been hit very hard, which is at the upper part of the range, but prices for these services in Israel are up 303 percent, in South Africa are up as high as 506 percent, in Sweden are up as high 235 percent, in Poland are up as high as 203 percent, and the Czech Republic are up as high as 193 percent – to round out the top. The average price increase for these services across all EMEA countries, taking out Turkey, looks to be around 89 percent.

Rounding out the set of price increases, in announcement letter AD25-0141, with the same dates as the two announcements above, we see that there is a price increase for the Committed Maintenance Services Levels within the Power Expert Care tech support services. The amount of the increase was not divulged.

In announcement letter AD25-0019, which simply says “IBM Power Subscription,” we find that IBM is offering infrastructure management services for on-premises Power Systems setups for customers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Power machines to support the SAP HANA in-memory database. The idea is to get customers used to the managed services, which will make it more likely that SAP HANA shops will eventually be comfortable to move to the RISE with SAP services on the PowerVS cloud. The Power Subscription offering for SAP HANA is also available through business partners.

The Power Subscription for SAP HANA, which we think would be a better name for this service unless it is going to be made more generically available at some future date, is offered on clusters of Power S1022, Power E1050, and Power E1080 servers. Like this:

These pod sizes for infrastructure seem pretty large, but this seems to be aimed at customers, not cloud builders who, in theory at least, would be competing with IBM’s RISE with SAP services. These are what IBM called Medium Pod sizes, and they are available for an initial five year term with a renewal annually after that. We presume it does not include hardware upgrades as part of the Power Subscription service. We would not be surprised if IBM does eventually offer such a thing.

And now for some RPQs. IBM has a special deal that allows for customers who are replacing older generation Power9 machines with Power10 iron to get static or mobile CPU core activations at a discounted price. The amount of the discount on the core activations is not given. Announcement letter AD25-0786 covers customers moving up to the Power S1024, announcement letter AD25-0793 covers those moving up to the Power E1050, and announcement letter AD25-0798 covers shops moving up to the Power E1080. This deal was revealed on November 12, 2024, and revised on February 11, 2025. We have no idea what the revisions were, but thought you should know there is a deal sweetener out there if you can’t wait for a Power11 machine (or don’t want to).

In announcement letter AD25-0777, we see that IBM has created an open SDK for the Rust programming language for AIX, which allows native running of Rust on Big Blue’s Unix variant. It is derived from the stable Rust 1.84 release, and it uses the same LLVM compiler framework as IBM uses for its C, C++, and Fortran compilers for AIX. This Rust compiler for AIX is available under subscription with support contracts, much like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other software that requires fussing. And, we think, makes a nice way to bring Rust “natively” to the IBM i platform through the PASE AIX runtime embedded within IBM i. We shall see.

In announcement letter AD25-0048 on February 11, IBM laid out its roadmap for extended support for the PowerVM 3.1.4 hypervisor Virtual I/O Server, or VIOS. PowerVM 3.1.4 VIOS will be under full support, including fix coverage for new defects, until April 30, 2026. The next day, on May 1, 2026, it will require an extended support contract to get defect fixes, and this will be available on Power8 and higher machines. The extended support will run on an annual contract, and the term for extended support will end on April 30, 2028.

And finally, just to remind you that there is an alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Power, Big Blue put out announcement letter AD25-0070, which details support for the new SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15.0.0 Linux platform from SUSE Linux. IBM is also supporting SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 11.0.0 on Power Systems. SUSE Linux is sold under a subscription for one or two sockets with one or two LPARs across those sockets. In the past, there were unlimited LPARs on Power iron inside of that one or two sockets.

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