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.
Cost per useful year penalizes generations that look cheap on annualized ownership cost alone but carry little remaining useful life -- a Power8 system near its IBM i 7.4 support cliff can show a low annual cost yet a high cost per useful year once the shrinking support window is priced in. This is the metric that ties Annualized Ownership Cost and Remaining Useful Life together into a single buy-versus-hold comparison.
Related Terms
Annualized Ownership Cost
The modeled per-year cost of owning a system over a defined hold period: amortized hardware, maintenance, and software licensing combined.
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.
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.