IBM paying Sun users to abandon SPARC following rejection

Maybe Sun Microsystems shouldn’t have said no to IBM’s acquisition offer, because it appears Big Blue doesn’t like rejection.

IBM doubled the dollar amount for its Power Rewards migration services specifically for Sun customers that switch from Sun SPARC, UltraSPARC or SPARC64 processor-based servers to IBM Power Systems.

Perhaps IBM is just taking the opportunity to catch Sun defectors from the upcoming Oracle takeover, but when IBM talked about acquiring Sun, there was speculation that the company would kill SPARC systems, which compete with IBM’s Power Systems.

So now that IBM can’t outright squash Sun’s SPARC system, the company hopes to get rid of SPARC another way; by giving Sun users an offer they can’t refuse.

IBM increased the money it offers to switch from competitive systems to IBM through its Power Rewards Program from $4,000 to $8,000, based on the number of SPARC, UltraSPARC or SPARC64 microprocessors used in each Sun or Fujitsu server.

Customers can use the migration services to move workloads running on Sun SPARC-based servers to IBM’s AIX, Linux or i operating environments.

For example, a Sun customer using a Sun Fire V890 system with eight microprocessors (or “cores”) would now receive $64,000 in migration services, up from $32,000, to move the workloads to an IBM Power system.

Since Oracle has not addressed their plans (or returned calls and emails to answer questions) about the fate of Sun’s hardware and SPARC systems under Oracle that this incentive will probably work quite well.