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IBM appears to have excess cloud servers to shift at low, low, prices

Fancy a cheap cloud Xeon, guv'nor? Bargain price, but just these few

Cloud computing prices come down regularly, but IBM's just offered a price cut of a sort The Register hasn't seen before – a temporary discount on bare metal servers running just one CPU family.

That CPU family is the Xeon E5-26XX v3 range, which Intel introduced from Q3 2014 through to mid-2015. In other words, old-ish, slow-ish stuff, certainly compared to the Xeon Scalable Family arriving any week now.

And perhaps rather unloved, too, as IBM's Bluemix cloud says you can have them at an unspecified discount, “for a limited time only – and only while current inventories are available.”

Which rather suggests that IBM has quite a few unused servers that it needs to find workloads for, stat.

Why might that be? Perhaps a substantial client has upgraded to new servers or quit Bluemix altogether. Perhaps IBM's cloud is just not attracting customers. Or maybe IBM just got its forecasting wrong and bought too many servers.

Whatever the reason, it's a curious offer and one that highlights Bluemix's lack of a spot price server market like those offered by Azure and AWS.

Analyst firm Gartner's IaaS magic quadrant last week opined that IBM's cloud “has not improved significantly since the IBM acquisition in mid-2013 [and is] missing many cloud IaaS capabilities required by midmarket and enterprise customers.”

It appears it may also be missing customers willing to pay full-freight for Xeon E5-26XX v3 servers. ®

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