Users have been urged to assess IBM's latest Power5+ server family because it includes an important discount, analyst Gartner has advised.
Last month the hardware firm introduced a new family of Power5-based servers, which moves the 570 model into IBM's high-end discount range. Gartner said the move means some users will be eligible for discounts at least 10% higher than those offered before, Gartner analyst George Weiss noted in a new paper on the pricing.
He said the discount could mean some p5 570 users would be eligible for a 40% discount.
The new machine offers 27% greater performance than the previous p5 570 model, with just over one million TPC-C (Transaction Processing Performance Council Benchmark) transactions per minute. Weiss said a list price reduction of about 10% (including disk and memory price drops) would bring the price per tpmC down from £2.83 to £2.53 (while the high-end scalable model, p595, is £2.89 per tpmC).
Weiss recommended users renegotiate and re-price all new orders for the p5 570. "As the number of cores per chip increases, pay closer attention to form factor, performance per core and power consumption," he said.
