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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
midrange.com
