[rbanffy]

Actually, if the prices are pre-agreed, it's a sweet deal. If I have a big box serving my users, being able to enable additional on premises capacity in minutes is nice.

Last time I did it, Dell took several weeks to deliver the new machine.

[stillworks]

We didn't try but being speaking with the vendor it seemed that enabling extra cores could take about a week from raising a purchase order to the activation code coming through. Maybe larger customers who run hundreds of these may have a quicker turn around time dealing directly with IBM.

And it's not that IBM deliver an entire server like in your case. For most practical applications, it's merely the case of adding CPUs to the pool of CPUs available to the PowerVM hypervisor. If you need to provision additional memory or IO, that needs to be accounted in as well.

That hypervisor is weird on it's own. It's part firmware part software.

If you have big box serving your users who solely rely on CPU cycles then yes, it's a sweet deal. And consider yourself very lucky if you have users who will immediately see better performance if you throw more CPU cycles at them.

[rbanffy]

I remember one case where the activation code was in a sealed envelope. If used, the machine would acknowledge that through its direct line with IBM and billing would proceed. The unlocked resources would become available immediately.

That was in the early 90's and a lot could have changed since then.