How much does a SAP HANA appliance really cost? Part 2, IBM & Ivy Bridge

The last blog I wrote, How much does a SAP HANA appliance really cost?, seemed to pique people’s interest. However, there were two really big questions that came for me out of it: what about the world’s best selling HANA appliance, the IBM X5, and what about the new SAP Certified Appliance Hardware for SAP HANAIvy Bridge appliances based on the IBM X6?

So, I painstakingly went through the IBM specification sheets for the IBM X5 appliance, and pieced together what precise IBM components would be required, and what the list price would be. Then, I went through the internet and found street prices for each component, which should give you a feeling for your negotiating power. Here’s what it looks like for 256GB (2 Socket, Size S) and 521GB (4 Socket, Size M) appliances:

So IBM list pricing is much higher than Dell – nearly double, but the discount you can expect is much heavier too. Note that this does not include GPFS licensing, but for a single node, I don’t see what GPFS brings.

Figuring this out for IBM X6 was much harder, and I may have made some small mistakes – please correct me if you see any. Ivy Bridge appliances only require 500GB of flash, and 3x RAM for snapshot disk, so they should be relatively cheaper. Plus, the IBM X6 appliance uses the flash storage in DIMM slots, which is very innovative. It is a very cool looking appliance. Here’s what the pricing looks like:

This is fascinating. At list price, a 256GB X5 system is the same price as a 512GB X6, and a 512GB X5 is even more expensive than the 1TB X6. This is notionally because the main cost in a system is the number of CPUs, and IvyBridge is 2x as powerful per CPU.

However, the discounts available for IvyBridge hardware are a fraction of what is available for Westmere hardware – whilst we can expect nearly a 50% discount off list for X5, I was seeing just a 15% discount for X6. I’m certain that this will change once the components are more readily available.

Conclusions

I took a few things away from this – first, you can buy a 512GB Westmere appliance from Dell online for $50k, whilst IBM’s street price is $65k. This probably means that my street prices can be negotiated further down by a savvy buyer.

And second, the $50k 1TB system that I predicted this year is not here yet, at least from IBM. But, given the $100k list price from IBM, once components settle down, we should definitely expect $50k from other vendors in 2014 – this should be your price target as a buyer. Once Huawei properly enters the US and EMEA markets, things will get very interesting because their FusionCube is clearly a very innovative system and may be much lower cost to build.

My third point is that these prices are for Data Mart or BW on HANA appliances. For Business Suite on HANA, we are allowed up to 1.5TB RAM per CPU (3x more). I need to price these out but they will be very cost-effective for up to 6TB!

My last point I’d like to make is that most systems I’m working on with HANA are much bigger than this – multi-node, scale out systems with 5-20TB RAM. Please don’t expect pricing to increase linearly for much bigger systems, because they require shared storage and much more expensive, 10-40GB/sec interconnects and networking.