Storage has been a strategic growth area for Lenovo for several years and, through a combination of its own in-house capabilities and a range of shrewd industry partnerships, the company continues to gain momentum in what remains one of the most competitive segments in the market. Indeed, Lenovo’s storage business is on a tear right now; for the past two years it has experienced healthy double-digit growth, and storage is a strategic pillar in its overall strategy to become an even more prominent force in the data center infrastructure market overall.
Lenovo’s latest set of a storage product announcements are a strong validation of this ambition. Dubbed the largest set of storage updates in its history, the announcements span the breadth of Lenovo’s portfolio, including individual products as well as solution-oriented packages that connect storage with other critical aspects of Lenovo’s data center infrastructure portfolio.
A major focus of Lenovo’s strategy overall is to help customers accelerate their AI implementations; a three-year initiative over which time frame the company is investing $1 billion. The company’s stated ambition here is to enable customers to implement a ‘hybrid AI’ strategy that better connects their disparate data and compute resources to drive AI success. To achieve this, customers need to modernize their data infrastructure, and they need help in tackling the complexity that can stall or even derail initial AI implementations.
On the data infrastructure modernization front, Lenovo is refreshing two-thirds of its core storage portfolio, with 21 new models across its ThinkSystem (enterprise storage systems) and ThinkAgile Series (software-defined infrastructure). The updates seem compelling, especially for customers running older storage platforms, and who are looking to take advantage of new Flash-based technology to boost performance and realize cost, energy and data center space savings.
For example, the new ThinkSystem DG7200, newly equipped with 60TB QLC Flash drives, can deliver 4.8PB of capacity in just 2U: for a customer looking to refresh a five-year-old equivalent system running—at the time—state of the art 1.8TB 10k HDDs, it would be replacing almost three thousand drives, spanning six racks. This equates to a 97% power reduction and a 99% reduction in density. Even Lenovo’s previous generation DG7000 system, released just three years ago, running 30TB QLC drives, would require 8U.
Meanwhile, Lenovo continues to double down on its software-defined storage portfolio, with the release of ThinkAgile SDI V4 Series, offering full-stack, turnkey solutions for simplifying key workloads, with a choice of operating environment (VMware, Nutanix, Microsoft).
A huge part of Lenovo’s focus is to raise its strategic value to customers by not only offering data center infrastructure elements, but also to package them into integrated solutions that simplify and optimize the deployment and ongoing management experience. One such new addition is a converged solution aimed at optimizing VMware virtualization environments, which combines ThinkAgile SDI with ThinkSystem DG storage. Lenovo claims this can drive up to a 40% reduction in VMware software investments.
For customers looking to make a fast start with AI, Lenovo announced preconfigured and validated ‘starter kits’ that combine Lenovo storage and servers with NVIDIA networking and GPUs. Aimed at retrieval-augmented generation, inferencing and model fine tuning, it’s available in ‘t-shirt sized’ options that enables customers to simplify and accelerate their enterprise deployments, with packages tailor-fitted to their requirements. Lenovo’s support for unified storage means customers can run consolidated file, block and object storage, eliminating data silos, while high-performance solid-state drives accelerate time to insight. Importantly, the starter kits also include a number of enterprise-grade security and resiliency features, such as AI-powered autonomous ransomware protection, encryption, and synchronous replication.
A final notable element of the update is the release of the industry’s first liquid cooled hyperconverged infrastructure solution. Initially built around the ThinkAgile HX/VX/MX (Nutanix) system, the solution utilizes Lenovo’s Neptune liquid cooling technology to drive up to 25% in energy savings. The offering is initially focused on Lenovo’s GPT-in-a-Box solution, which also features integrations with NVIDIA NIMs and Hugging face, for read-to-use large language models.