Re: IBM will announce two new System i models, 515 and 525 on Apr. 10.

I can't speak to the System p conundrum. I am still a little mystified by the same hardware, different pricing approach between i and p. If the hardware is identical, then the OS is the only differentiator and I'd personally prefer to administer an i. But again, I don't know much about p.

This does help in the SMB market IMHO. It doesn't solve all the problems but it certainly provides some new opportunities and that can only be a good thing.

Pete


Steve Richter wrote:

On 4/11/07, Pete Helgren <Pete@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

It is all very sweet. I know one entity that has just 3 users on the
system. The best I could do at the time was $25k (with a few growth
tweaks). Now they could have gotten in for around $10k and had a fairly
robust system they could grow with.

I hope you are right, but IBM is still charging twice the market price
and limiting the number of cores. ITJungle says the entry i515 comes
with 5 users @ $250 per user with a final price of $7995. The two
lowest priced entry p5 systems are priced at $2995 and $3717. On those
systems, you add AIX or Linux and you are ready to run. If i5/OS was
available on the p5 the price would be $4245 and $4967. Why the extra
$3000 for the i515?? ( If the answer is DB2, then why the higher
price per user for i5/OS than AIX? )

If your workload is going to be Java and PHP you will need multiple
cores. No different than running Java on AIX on the p5. A quad core
p5 starts at $5830
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/hardware/entry/510q/91101m6a.html A
quad core i5 likely starts at 6 figures.

-Steve