Lenovo Group is marking its 30th anniversary with its largest data-center product launch ever, with more than 50 new products covering servers, storage, and edge systems.
Specifically, the celebration is for the ThinkSystem server, and many of the announcements were about upgrades. first introduced under the name PS/2 Server when IBM owned the business. It sold that x86 business to Lenovo in 2015, and it became the Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group.
Due to the sheer numbers we won’t get into the individual products. Suffice it to say nearly everything is being upgraded. The next generation of ThinkSystem servers and storage, along with the ThinkEdge edge computing device lineup, as well as the ThinkAgile family of hyperconverged infrastructure appliances collectively are called Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions V3.
New V3 systems will be available with Intel’s latest Xeon Scalable processors as well as AMD Epyc and Arm-based processors. The new lineup includes 15 new ThinkSystem servers with either AMD’s latest Epyc or Intel’s Xeon Scalable processors. The new ThinkSystems are available with AI accelerators, and GPUs, DPUs, SmartNICs, and FPGAs.
Lenovo says the result is performance. Lenovo’s scale-up systems can provide 70% faster financial-analytic performance and AI modeling and development twice as fast as the previous generation of hardware, according to Kamran Amini, vice president and general manager of infrastructure solutions, group server storage and software defined solutions.
“The new V3 systems are all built flexible and customizable to be able to address the smallest customer base to the largest global cloud service-provider’s needs. They are designed for the telcos and large enterprise and SMB,” said Amini.
Lenovo is covering an array of software platforms with its hyperconvered ThinkAgile servers. The ThinkAgile MX and SMX are powered by Microsoft Azure HCI and Azure Stack while the ThinkAgile HX is powered by Nutanix and the ThinkAgile VX powered by VMware vCenter.
The company also updated its DE series of storage products, featuring all-flash as well as flash/HDD hybrids. They range from the all-flash DE6600HF, which delivers 2 million IOPS, to the entry level 6400 all flash storage solution that can scale up to 1.8 petabytes for under $20,000.
In addition to all-flash configuration, the hybrid flash/mechanical drive configurations are flexible and can hold up to eight petabytes. This will enable enterprises to start with smaller capacity and add to it as their business grows, said Amini.
“These new solutions are also targeted for new application workloads that are seeing in the industry, such as AI, big-data analytics, and edge computing,” he said.
To help manage tdata-center systems, Lenovo has introduced a cloud-based service called XClarity One, an infrastructure-management tool that handles IT orchestration, deployment, automation, metering, and support spanning on-premises, edge, and cloud. It manages Lenovo’s on-demand TruScale system deployment, supporting pay-as-you-go usage of IT equipment.
The service enables administrators to monitor the performance of servers and track hardware usage if they are using a consumption-based model. Additionally, XClarity One promises to ease a number of common infrastructure management tasks such as deploying new equipment.
Finally, Lenovo introduced the fifth generation of Neptune Direct Water-Cooling technology. Lenovo got the water cooling religion earlier than its competitors and Neptune is a key differentiator for the company.
Lenovo introduced Neptune for HPC gear, but said the new generation can extend water cooling to general-purpose computerst. The new technology recycles warm water to cool systems and can reduce power consumption up to 40 percent over older versions of Neptune.
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