SMB IT | Curtis Franklin » IBM's Pricing Reacts to New Server Architectures

July 24, 2006 | Comments: (0)

IBM's Pricing Reacts to New Server Architectures

TAGS: SMB Hardware

Buying servers may be changing real soon. Starting today, IBM says it will begin selling its servers (enterprise and SMB) based on "processor value units". Don't expect radical dollar changes right now, but look for this move to more closely tie together the cost of the software with the cost of the CPUs required to run it.

So IBM intends to keep assigning these value units to new CPUs as they come out--right now, for example, a dual-core Xeon is worth 100 process units, so a dual Xeon system would be worth 200 units.

IBM says it's making this move not only in response to multi-core CPUs, but also to the growing trend in server virtualization. Big Blue expects software licensing to follow a similar path as a result, but haven't been clear on how that's going to shape up.

Theoretically, this should be good news for SMBs, who often wind up buying more hardware than they really need simply because of software requirements. Then again, nobody's in the business of giving anything away, so don't go throwing any parties.

Posted by Oliver Rist on July 24, 2006 09:16 PM

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