Lenovo has introduced what it calls the largest collection of infrastructure solutions in the 30-year history of the ThinkSystem product line.
Collectively dubbed the Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions V3 portfolio, the giant wave of new offerings includes over 50 additions to the hardware maker’s ThinkSystem, ThinkAgile, and ThinkEdge families, as well as updates to its XClarity management software and ThinkShield security technologies.
“Today is one of those truly exciting days in our company’s history,” said Executive Vice President Kirk Skaugen during a webcast this morning, noting that the V3 portfolio launch is three and a half times larger than its biggest predecessor.
The 15 new ThinkSystem servers unveiled today, which are powered by AMD, Intel, and Arm-based processors, range from tower, 1U, and 2U devices with single or dual sockets to high-density solutions and scale-up platforms for larger use cases. All are equipped with DDR5 memory and PCIe Gen5 interconnect, among other components, and deliver 70% faster performance on financial analytics workloads and a 2x speed improvement on artificial intelligence model development versus earlier units, according to Lenovo.
“Customers of small to medium size and large enterprises are thinking about how to take data and leverage AI to drive a business outcome initiative,” said Kanram Amini, vice president and general manager of servers, software, and storage at Lenovo, in a conversation with ChannelPro.
Users can employ the latest, fifth-generation version of Lenovo’s Neptune Direct Water-Cooling to keep the new servers at safe temperatures when running AI applications and other heat-intensive workloads. The technology contributes to sustainable IT initiatives as well, Amini continues, by reducing power consumption up to 40%.
The Infrastructure Solutions V3 portfolio makes Direct Water-Cooling available in general purpose servers, rather than high-performance computing devices only, for the first time.
ThinkSystem storage arrays introduced today include the new DE6400 and DE6600 series, both of which are available in all-flash and hybrid formats and provide a 50% price performance boost over earlier, comparable systems, according to Amini. The new systems deliver a 100% increase in data processing performance as well, he adds.
“They’re designed for the new world of AI and the new world of edge computing, and also data analytics and big data,” Amini says. The flash edition of the DE6600, he continues, is the first entry-level, NVMe-only storage device in the market.
“Now you’re enabling an SMB customer through the channel to buy storage that’s delivering all NVMe, up to 1.8 petabytes of capacity of all flash with 2x performance from gen to gen, at a reasonable price that’s sub-$25,000,” Amini says.
Lenovo climbed from the number six provider of storage products priced below $25,000 to number two between 2018 and 2021, according to IDC. That price band accounts for roughly 60% of global shipments.
In the single biggest product family expansion announced today, Lenovo has added 32 Microsoft-, Nutanix-, and VMware-based hyperconverged infrastructure systems to its ThinkAgile line. All of the new offerings are turnkey solutions, Amini emphasizes.
“One of the issues a lot of small customers have is they don’t have the IT skills and staff to be able to deploy a private multi-cloud, hybrid cloud solution,” he says. “With our engineered, integrated systems we can deliver 85% faster deployment for those customers because we build and integrate everything out of our factory.” A further dividend of those quicker rollouts, he adds, is up to 47% lower total cost of ownership.
New as well to ThinkAgile are pre-configured, Microsoft Azure-based hyperconverged solutions for artificial intelligence and machine learning, backup and recovery, and virtual desktop infrastructure. The latest ThinkAgile units, Amini says, support 25% more VDI users per device on average than the previous generation.
Other hardware releases showcased today include the new TruScale for HPC XtraRack, an addition to the high-performance computing-as-a-service solution Lenovo introduced in January that’s designed to let fast-growing organizations with large capacity requirements pre-install entire racks of devices for immediate use on demand.
“Many HPC customers do not expand capacity by adding a single or two nodes. They expand elastically across multiple racks,” Amini says.
XClarity One, a new cloud-native, multitenant edition of Lenovo’s XClarity management solution, aims to make administering Lenovo infrastructure easier by allowing users to monitor and support hardware in data centers, branch sites, and edge computing deployments through a single console. The system incorporates functionality previously available separately in Lenovo’s Open Cloud Automation solution.
“Now the customer doesn’t have to have multiple tools to manage what’s in their core data center and what’s in their edge environment,” Amini says.
Automation enhancements in XClarity One, according to Amini, enable organizations to onboard new environments up to three times faster, while built-in predictive analytics deliver advance notice of approaching technical issues and drive automatic remediation and service launches.
New metering functionality, meanwhile, lets users of Lenovo’s TruScale infrastructure-as-a-service program view real-time consumption data as well. All of the products announced today are available through TruScale.
Updates to Lenovo’s ThinkShield security platform include the introduction of Lenovo System Guard, which expands protection from device tampering available inside Lenovo’s own factories and warehouses previously all the way across third-party supply chains out to end users.
“It basically takes a snapshot of the configuration of the entire platform,” Amini explains. “If anything has been tampered with, from memory to I/O to CPU to adapters, IT will be notified as soon as the customer boots up the system.”
A second ThinkShield enhancement called the Modular Root of Trust is designed to provide further, hardware-based protection from tampering and accelerate recovery from successful attacks by equipping devices with trusted, immutable firmware that users can boot into after a breach.
Today’s launch event coincides with the 30th anniversary of the precise date when IBM shipped its first x86-based server, and the 30th year since the launch of IBM’s ThinkPad line of notebooks. Lenovo acquired IBM’s x86 portfolio in 2014. Together, Lenovo and IBM have shipped more than 24 million servers since 1992.
