IBM Power hardware pricing terms

IBM Power Hardware Pricing Glossary

Plain-English definitions for IBM Power hardware pricing, performance, support life, software tiers, and ownership cost.

A

• Annualized Ownership Cost ... The modeled per-year cost of owning a system over a defined hold period: amortized hardware, maintenance, and software licensing combined.

B

• Book Value / Depreciation ... The accounting value a system carries on your books as it ages, versus what it would actually fetch on the secondary market.
• Breakeven Point (Upgrade Economics) ... The point at which the ongoing cost of keeping an older Power generation in service (maintenance, risk, software) exceeds the cost of replacing it.

C

• Configuration Efficiency (Diminishing Returns) ... The point at which adding more cores, memory, or storage to a configuration stops producing proportional economic value.
• Cost per CPW ... Acquisition or ownership cost divided by CPW capacity delivered -- the core cost-efficiency measure used across this site's Market Price analysis.
• Cost per Useful Year ... Annualized ownership cost divided by remaining useful life -- what a generation actually costs per year of IBM-supported service you get out of it, not just its sticker price.
• CPW ... Commercial Processing Workload, IBM's relative-performance benchmark for IBM i systems, used to compare processor options across Power generations.

E

• End of Marketing (Withdrawal from Marketing) ... The date IBM stops selling a given Power model new; existing units remain supported until their separate end-of-service date.
• End of Service (EOS) ... The date IBM stops offering standard hardware maintenance and service on a given Power model.

I

• IBM i Software Tier ... IBM's per-core licensing bracket for IBM i (P05, P10, P20, P30, P50) that sets your annual or perpetual software cost based on processor feature code, independent of the Power generation running underneath it.

P

• Perpetual Licensing ... IBM's traditional one-time-purchase IBM i licensing model, paid once per core rather than annually.
• Power Value Index (PVI) ... This site's independently developed 0-100 composite score ranking IBM Power8 through Power11 on performance, capacity, remaining useful life, software economics, market price, and value retention.

R

• Remaining Useful Life (RUL) ... The years of standard IBM support remaining on a given Power generation, expressed as a share of its typical full lifecycle.
• rPerf ... Relative Performance, IBM's benchmark estimate for AIX and Linux workload throughput, analogous to CPW but for non-IBM i operating systems.

S

• Subscription Licensing ... IBM's pay-per-year IBM i licensing model, billed per core per year, introduced as an alternative to perpetual (one-time) licensing.
• SWMA ... Software Maintenance Agreement, the ongoing annual fee that keeps a perpetual IBM i license entitled to fixes, updates, and new releases.

T

• Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) ... The full multi-year cost of running a system: acquisition, hardware maintenance, software licensing, and services, combined.

U

• Used Power Market (Secondary Market) ... The dealer, broker, and marketplace ecosystem for buying and selling pre-owned IBM Power hardware once IBM withdraws a model from new-unit sale.

V

• Value Retention ... How well a Power generation holds resale value on the active secondary market relative to its original cost.
• Value Retention Curve ... The trendline of a Power generation's Value Retention score over time, from its end-of-marketing date through the maturity of its secondary market.