Re: iSeries Disk Pricing - your questions

Anne,

We maintain a mixed load of transaction based processing and
e-business, collaboration and Web enablement work. The part
that eats up disk and drives upgrades is the transaction processing.
The transaction processing capabilities of the iSeries are why we
have an iSeries. In our case the arm requirement for us with 17G
drives puts us at about 35% of total capacity. That has a double
whammy effect. We have to buy more disk for arms, and also have
to buy an expansion units to hold that disk. In effect our cost per
gigabyte is very high even with the price reduction.

It may be possible to push this some by configuring multiple ASPs,
what is your disk experts recommendation in that regard?

On a positive note, the memory price reductions were a total win
for us.

David Morris

>>> alucas@us.ibm.com 05/02/02 12:09PM >>>
OK .... here's the response of disk pricing....   let me know if you
have
other questions/comments...   feel free to send them to me directly.

Anne,  here's a response for your to post to midrange-L

Question: "If I am an iSeries customer whose workload requires me to
buy
based on arms of DASD, how does announcing a price decrease on 17.5GB
DASD
down to 8.5GB prices help me?"

Answer:
One of the specific objectives of our April 29 announcement was to
make
managing growth and adding new workloads to your iSeries simpler and
more
affordable. While many workloads and applications that run on iSeries
are
and will continue to be arm dependant, most of the e-business,
collaboration and Web enablement work is more sensitive to disk
capacity
and memory size.

The specific price decreases that we announced on large memory cards,
large
capacity disk drives, Capacity Upgrade on Demand, and Model 270
interactive
features are intended to enable the addition and consolidation of
these
applications on your iSeries more affordable than ever.  The disk
price
decrease provides twice the capacity at the same price. Many customers
will
now be able to acquire disk capacity for additional growth, or
implement
RAID or mirrored disk protection less expensively than before.

Looking at the complete solution requirements shows the full impact of
the
price reductions. For a customer who needs 5250 interactive support and
was
considering a Model 270-2248 (150 processor CPW), they can now acquire
an
e-business capable Model 270 (1070 processor CPW)  solution at nearly
35%
less than before.  A Model 830 customer who is adding e-business work
to
their system can benefit from pricing that is reduced well over 50%
from
before.

If you as a customer can now have multiple workloads on one server, it
reduces your overall total cost of ownership far beyond what you'll see
at
initial time of purchase. You'll also be able to take full advantage of
the
wide range of iSeries systems benefits.