Lenovo Enters the SAN Fray with Homegrown Models

I’ll say it once, and I’ll say it again: Storage ain’t sexy. But data’s got to be stored somewhere, and these days even SMBs need enterprise-level storage.

Enter Lenovo, which has introduced two homegrown SAN units designed to offer a lot of value based on the price point, including a jumping off point to SSD storage, said Denny Lane, director of Product Marketing, Enterprise Business Group at Lenovo.

“The rate of growth of storage and increasing demands of compliance and regulatory issues …  we’re seeing that grow exponentially,” he said. With that in mind, most SMBs need more than the internal storage or network-attached storage (NAS) they can afford.

“Our latest offerings we believe are at an aggressive price point that’s simple to deploy and provides enterprise-level feature sets that work well from the branch office to the data center,” Lane said.

The Lenovo Storage S2200 and S3200 storage arrays offer dual and single controllers in 2U-12 and 24 drive configurations. The 3200 in particular supports a hybrid configuration, enabling a transition to an all-flash storage environment over time.

“We’re seeing a lot of hype about all flash-arrays, so we think this will be a stepping stone for customers moving to flash technology for first time,” Lane said.

Both units include the Lenovo SAN Manager, which offers features including:

“This is a very high performance, general purpose-type of array,” Lane said. “We see a huge amount of potential for partners with storage—right now about 45 percent of sales in the entry space is led by server sales. We think it’s ideal that we can team [servers and storage] at an aggressive price point, especially with more customers replacing their storage and servers as they move beyond fibre.”

Lane noted the Lenovo Storage S2200 and S3200, which made their debut this week at Lenovo Tech World in Beijing, is made from home-grown technology with partnering for some of the development. “It’s not part of the IBM [x86 server] acquisitions,” he said. “We continue to do business with IBM and we think this is a nice complement with what we do with EMC and IBM.”

Partners that see the value in the natural pairing of servers and storage will be happy to have another options for their customers, especially at the lower end of the customer spectrum. Lenovo is good at providing sensible, if not sexy, options for its partners and their customers to keep their data safe and sound.