| IBM, Novell slash prices for blades |
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Urvashi Khanna, 24x7 Updates
IBM and Novell give a reason to customers to take a sigh of relief. They are making it easier to buy and manage blade servers by offering a one-price licensing agreement for Novell SUSE Linux on IBM’s BladeCenter chassis. The chassis licensing scheme can be a big money-saver for customers, said Juhi Jotwani, director of IBM’s BladeCenter and xSeries solutions. The license covers up to 14 Intel-based, AMD-based or PowerPC-based servers, either single- or multi-processor units.
A one-year license for the full chassis lists for $2,792, and a three-year license costs $6,980, meaning that a customer can save up to $17,100 over a three-year period using the chassis license, she said. This will cover all blades within the Blade Centre chassis, regardless of CPU type or quantity. For example, a one-year operating system license for SUSE Linux for a blade server with two Intel processors costs $349, while the same license for a PowerPC-based server costs $689, according to Jotwani. Using the PowerPC license as a base, it would cost customers about $24,080 to license SUSE Linux for three years for 14 servers, compared with $6,980 using the new chassis license, she said.
Ed Anderson, Novell’s vice president of product marketing, told eWEEK that the price had been set at the cost of running eight blades, "and everything after that is just cost savings."
Intel targets its low-voltage Xeon processors at blade systems. IBM’s offering follows that of competitor Hewlett-Packard Co. At LinuxWorld in San Francisco in August, Red Hat and HP announced an all-in-one software bundle designed for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and HP BladeSystem environment.
The pair also offered clustering support with Red Hat GFS (Global File System) in a package with HP Serviceguard for Linux.
"What we are offering is a single SLES 9 license for an IBM BladeCenter chassis, which is the first of a kind-pricing deal as, until now, operating systems and applications have been priced per user or per server or via an enterprise license," Juhi Jotwani, the director of IBM’s BladeCenter and xSeries solutions in Raleigh, N.C., told eWEEK.
This chassis subscription model will help customers maintain control over the cost of computing by potentially reducing subscription administration requirements and the need for separate subscriptions on each blade server. Users will be able to configure, re-provision and expand on demand within an IBM Blade Centre chassis with up to 14 blade servers without having to purchase additional subscriptions to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Customers can mix-and-match any number of blade servers with Intel, AMD and Power-based CPUs in a single chassis with this single subscription. This subscription model will help customers implement scalable, multi-tier, and heterogeneous Linux workloads. However, Efrain Rovira, HP’s worldwide director of Linux marketing in Houston, rebuffed Jotwani’s criticism, telling eWEEK that IBM and Novell were simply following its lead. And such savings are only a start, said Jeff Medeiros, CEO of rs-unix, a San Francisco-based IBM partner. The solution provider has been putting Linux on IBM blade servers for about eight months, but as with any operating system, the management of server licenses becomes difficult over time as the number of servers grows, he said, noting that there’s a new license to track every time a new blade is inserted into a chassis.
"Also, the subscription and support for Linux licenses might not be the same time as the hardware," Medeiros said. "It becomes difficult to manage all these assets. This new licensing cuts a significant amount of that management."
Ed Anderson, vice president of product marketing for Novell, said the software license is a Novell SKU that solution providers can purchase from his company or IBM. Since the OS isn’t bundled with the BladeCenter chassis, solution providers can provide it to customers with existing blade server enclosures as current per-server licenses expire.
The IBM/Novell license agreement is not the first such agreement for Linux on blade servers. In early August, Hewlett-Packard signed an agreement with Red Hat whereby for one price, an HP blade server enclosure with up to 17 devices--including SAN switches, IP switches, and up to eight servers or storage devices--is covered by a single Red Hat Enterprise Linux license.
IBM already holds a 42 percent share of the blade architecture market, according to research group IDC, and has ship
ped more than 250,000 blades since market introduction. Big Blue also makes some 30 percent of its revenue in the SMB (small and midsize business) space. Of course, having SLES 9 on such terms is just the beginning. Jotwani did not want to comment on whether Big Blue was pursuing a similar deal with Novell’s rival, Red Hat, but eventually said that IBM was discussing the idea with Red Hat and other unnamed software makers. And there is more to chassis-level pricing than the operating system; there is all that other middleware and application software that runs atop those blades to consider. "We are working with other software providers to get them to pursue chassis-level software pricing," says Jotwani. "This is just the first example of what we think will be a shift in the marketplace." To that end, Jotwani is in talks with IBM’s own Software Group to consider this new pricing, too.
Of course, having SLES 9 on such terms is just the beginning. Jotwani did not want to comment on whether Big Blue was pursuing a similar deal with Novell’s rival, Red Hat, but eventually said that IBM was discussing the idea with Red Hat and other unnamed software makers. And there is more to chassis-level pricing than the operating system; there is all that other middleware and application software that runs atop those blades to consider. "We are working with other software providers to get them to pursue chassis-level software pricing," says Jotwani. "This is just the first example of what we think will be a shift in the marketplace." To that end, Jotwani is in talks with IBM’s own Software Group to consider this new pricing, too.
IBM and Novell are also working together on the formation of Blade.org, a planned collaborative organisation aimed at spurring solution development and innovation around IBM Blade Centre.
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