February 28, 2022
Timothy Pricket Morgan
In an inflationary environment with all kinds of parts shortages, it’s no surprise that IT vendors raise their list prices and/or reduce the extent of their discounts when negotiating deals. We’re certainly in that kind of environment, and we’re also about to announce new entry-level and mid-range servers based on IBM’s Power10 as well.
Given all of this, we expected Big Blue to announce price increases on older Power9 irons, which may be in short supply and therefore subject to “opportunistic pricing” as too much demand drives out too little supply. . (Gamer and data center GPUs currently sell for 2X the manufacturer’s list price, just to give you an example.) In fact, we were expecting a much broader set of hardware and maintenance price increases. , and the hardware price increases that IBM published in announcement letter 322-368 may be quite large in terms of percentages, but they are not as broadly applied across the entire Power Systems line as we we had planned it. And so far we haven’t seen a general price increase for technical support services for the Power Systems range either, but in our bones we believe that will happen soon.
The price increase for certain Power Systems servers and their processors, memory, and peripherals was announced on February 25 and takes effect on April Fool’s Day, which of course is April 1. (No kidding.) Although this is an announcement from IBM in the United States, the price increases are in US dollars and translated into other currencies and applied globally.
The full set of price increases are outlined in this spreadsheet provided by IBM, and they range from 10% to 42.7%. Interestingly, IBM doubled the price of the base “Denali” Power E1080 server from $30,000 to $60,000, and the prices of the CPU modules that go into the Power E1080 were also increased. Four of the Power10 processors with ten active cores each running at 3.65GHz now cost $185.625, up 25%, and four of the 12-core Power10 processors running at 3.6GHz cost $302,500, up 25% . The price of a quad of the high-end quad 15-core Power10 processors running at 3.55 GHz will increase by 15% to $404,800. DDR4 memory cards, which have capacities of 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and 1TB, will also increase by 25% from April 1. .
In other words, if you’re thinking of buying a Power E1080, you might want to do so within the next month.
The price of the base Power S914, which has a single socket and uses the Power9 processor which will soon be replaced by a new Power S1014 machine using Power10 chips, will increase by 41.3% to $4,450.
Prices for power distribution units for racks and for various PCI-Express 3.0 storage controllers are also on the rise from April Fool’s Day.
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