Re: Current PTF groups and SPECTRE/MELTDOWN

[DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

IBM looks at the costs to maintain the systems across all servers in a 
given model. So the popular 8286-41A for example. They look at all the 
costs including training, stocking of parts, MTTR and MTTF.

Some things everyone has, such as power supplies, fans, planar board, 
Ethernet card, front panel, DVD drive etc. So it makes obvious sense for 
those to be covered same for all.

Then they look at features that are more rare and decide if the extra 
cost to track who has 'em is worth the extra money they would have to 
charge. Some such as the high function RAID cards are pretty expensive 
but they also know a high percentage of customers have them. So the 
small savings for the few that don't have them doesn't warrant the extra 
paperwork.

For the 41A there are primarily two things that elicit an Extra Charge 
and that is the disk backplane and SSDs.

For the disk backplane they just look at how many slots ya got and the 
cost is based on that. Whether you have an air flow filler in there 
(MTTF=Forever) or a 600GB Spinning disk, it's covered. All of the 
available spinning disks are so low cost at the commodity level that 
counting how many you got and increasing your maintenance by $xx a month 
for adding 8 new drives simply makes no sense given the cost to track 'em.

Yes a few customers with VERY low drive counts could possibly save a few 
pennies if IBM charged by the drive but overall everyone would pay more 
due to the extra cost of tracking and maintenance contract updates etc.

SSDs though while they continue to get cheaper are still expensive. SO 
to allow for SSDs IBM has two choices. Raise the price for maintenance 
on the backplane so as to cover all SSD as well *OR* charge maintenance 
per SSD.

All those who have NO SSDs then are happy IBM chose to charge per SSD 
rather than bury it in the cost of the backplane and thus subsidizing 
those who have them.

Make sense?

        - Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 2/28/2018 3:29 PM, Rob Berendt wrote:
> Why?
>
>
> Rob Berendt