System iNetwork

April 15, 2008

Another Power and i Pro: No Hardware Penalties for i

Another reason to like IBM's new Power initiative is that it seems to be leading to more favorable cost-to-value ratios for the i world. You can argue that even at higher cost-of-entry prices, the total cost of ownership of running on a System i is still less expensive than running on a System p with AIX, but cost of acquisition is what's troublesome to so many IT buyers.

By sharing the same hardware as System p -- the Power brand of servers -- i-focused customers can rest assured that nobody is getting a better deal on basically the same box shipping off the assembly line just because he or she is going to run AIX on it.

Of course, the key reason System p prices have been more favorable is because of stiff competition in the Unix market, which will no doubt continue to help hold Power pricing down -- definitely good for the i.

"Now in the new Power Systems world, we have one hardware product line with one set of prices, with one set of terms and conditions, with one set of maintenance," Mark Shearer, IBM's vice president of marketing and offerings for the IBM Business Systems group, told the System iNEWS team at COMMON Nashville, noting that i-clients won't pay a "penalty" for the cost of disk or memory.

Better Pricing on Blades, Too

In addition to price parity on Power Systems, i customers, both new and existing, can get into a BladeCenter S environment for the same cost as a comparably set up Power 520 i edition system. So in some ways this becomes a choice of scaling up or scaling out but sticking to the cost factor, "From a financial point of view, it will be as attractive to purchase i edition blades as it is to purchase an i edition Power System, and we're doing that to make it easier and more compelling to simplify and integrate the Windows infrastructure with the i infrastructure [in client organizations]," Shearer said. Clearly this is part of a broader play from IBM, but since most i customers have Windows servers running, too, a BladeCenter package might enable a System i shop to upgrade where it might otherwise have been stuck waiting for a more favorable budget.

To put the "power" of IBM's 1-, 2-, and 4-way POWER6-based blades in context, "something like 90 percent of most of our clients' workloads can easily fit on a single Power blade," Shearer noted.

Blades are another positive, of course, worthy of their own dedicated post. But back to the money -- the cost of running an i is more favorable now than it has been in years, and customers have more options than ever in deciding how to spend their i money.

Posted by cmaxcer at April 15, 2008 11:07 PM