High-end and midrange defined

Last week I spoke to Ross Mauri, the IBM general manager of Power Systems, who talked some about the IBM financial numbers that recently came out. Mauri did some bragging about how Power Systems, which IBM called the “converged System p” line in its release, was up 29% year-over-year. Although this number is compared to just the System p servers alone from the previous year, it was still a good quarter.

Mauri added that among Power systems, the high-end was up 21% and the midrange was up 68%. Well, what does that mean?

Typically IBM thinks of the 590 as the high-end, the 570 as the midrange, and the 550 and below as small. But the way in which IDC, the Framingham, Mass. IT research firm, makes distinctions can muddy the waters a bit. For IDC, the high-end includes servers that are $250,000 and more, while the midrange is $100,000 to $250,000 and the small servers are less than $100,000.

Under those definitions, the 570 gets split up. Some of the 570s get calculated in the high-end alongside the 590s, and some of them get calculated in the midrange alongside the 550s. In the end, Mauri used these IDC definitions when stating the percentage increases above. But in general, it was interesting to discover what exactly constitutes high-end, and what exactly constitutes midrange, in the industry.