Lenovo’s Wave Of The Future Is Here Today: 5 Next-Generation Data Center Products

Lenovo’s data center innovation engine is in full swing this year as the company launches a slew of new architectures to elevate server capabilities and take its hybrid cloud strategy to the next level.

Lenovo’s data center innovation engine is in full swing this year as the company launched a slew of new architectures to elevate server capabilities and take its hybrid cloud strategy to the next level.

“We recently launched our biggest, broadest set of solutions around hybrid cloud,” said Wilfredo Sotolongo, Chief Customer Officer for Lenovo Data Center Group in an interview with CRN. “We launched the latest and great versions of hybrid cloud appliances based on Nutanix, VMware, Microsoft and Diamanti, who’s a Kubernetes hybrid cloud platform. We launched both Intel and AMD options around some of these. What we are doing is positioning ourselves as a provider of hybrid cloud solutions that addressed the breathe of our offerings from the largest enterprises, who tend to go with a VMware-based solution, to the smallest enterprises that tend to go with a Microsoft set of solutions, and then everything in-between. So we position ourselves as a bit of a swiss army knife, capability of executing hybrid cloud solutions with our alliance partners.”

CRN breaks down five of the most important data center product launches from Lenovo in 2020.

ThinkAgile HX

Lenovo has reached new levels of performance and efficiency for end-user computing with its new ThinkAgile HX hyperconverged infrastructure system due, in part, to it being powered by AMD EPYC processors along with Nutanix software. The new ThinkAgile HX system provides a range of core counts to match application needs, two GPUs per one unit and additional memory bandwidth. The hyperconverged infrastructure enables customers to run virtual desktop workloads and maintain consistent

performance in the same 1U form factor with up to 50 percent fewer servers. Target use cases for ThinkAgile HX are around virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and virtualization consolidation.

ThinkAgile HX is factory-integrated, validated and configured with preloaded Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software. The company also has integrated ThinkAgile Network Orchestrator with Nutanix Prism to reduce human error and downtime by automating switch configuration in response to changes in the virtual network.

ThinkAgile MX And Microsoft Azure Stack

Lenovo partnered with Microsoft to launch the Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Azure Stack HCI Edge and Data Center line of hyperconverged appliances. The new ThinkAgile MX series of appliances provides a one-stop shop for customers to the Azure Stack HCI to give businesses an easy way to deploy, manage and scale Azure services from edge to core to cloud. ThinkAgile MX has a single console for life-cycle management that allows customers to easily modernize and scale their on-premises infrastructure from edge solutions to the cloud. Lenovo’s goal is to enable customers to rapidly deploy a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Lenovo will off er consumption-based, pay-as-you-go pricing of Azure Stack HCI and Azure Stack Hub.

ThinkSystem SR860 V2

In a move to help customers accelerate highperformance workloads and simplify data management, Lenovo built the ThinkSystem SR860 V2 server. The server features third-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors with enhanced support for SAP HANA based on the Intel Optane Persistent Memory 200 series. The SR860 V2 is combined with Lenovo’s DM7100 storage system along with business intelligence solutions from SAP. The server includes 48 2.5-inch drives to improve the rate at which data can be consumed. It also includes four double-wide 300W or eight single-wide GPUs for handling artificial intelligence workloads, VDI deployments and data analytics.

ThinkSystem SR665

This springLenovo launched its next-generation two-socket ThinkSystem SR665 server tailor-made to handle the explosion of data around critical workloads. The 2U form-factor server utilizes up to two second-generation AMD EPYC 7002 CPUs with classleading memory speed, storage and GPU density. With the AMD EPYC 7002 processor—the world’s first 7-nanometer data center CPU—the new ThinkSystem SR665 features up to 128 cores. Lenovo has increased on-board storage of up to 40 2.5-inch drives or up to 32 NVMe drives. The SR665 off ers 32 DDR4 memory slots and 4 TB using 128-GB RDIMMs, while also containing up to 8X PCIe 4.0 slots.

ThinkAgile VX

Lenovo teamed up with VMware on the ThinkAgile VX HCI series, powered by VMware’s vSAN and ESXi, which is aimed at improving agility and reliability for SAP HANA database deployments. Lenovo’s ThinkAgile VX HCI series is 4S certified nodes that enable customers to modernize their infrastructure for high-end database offerings and SAP HANA. The platform improves life-cycle management of vSAN environments via the integration of Lenovo XClarity Management software and the new vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) tools. The ThinkAgile VX 4S off ering provides double the SAP HANA database memory and offers direct-connect NVMe to accelerate response times, speed business insight and improve total cost of ownership.