Lenovo Infrastructure Group Touts Largest Launch Yet with More than 50 Products

Marking Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group’s largest data center product launch yet, the company introduced more than 50 new servers, storage and edge systems. The Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group V3 lineup, unveiled on Wednesday, will include the next generation of AMD, Arm, Intel and Nvidia-powered systems.

Besides a wide array of more robust infrastructure, Lenovo is readying an upgrade to its Neptune warm water-cooling technology. Also, Lenovo revealed a new unified, cloud-based management platform called XClarity One. The company didn’t announce pricing or ship dates. But Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group president Kirk Skaugen, in a virtual launch event for media and analysts, underscored the timing.

IBM, which sold its x86 server business to Lenovo in 2015, launched the first system 30 years ago to date. The first release was called the PS/2 Server, Skaugen (pictured above) noted.

“Today’s portfolio announcement is three-and-a-half times larger than any product and solutions announcement in our 30-year history,” he said.

XClarity One

The new XClarity One tool integrates Lenovo’s TruScale “as-a-service” cloud consumption option with interfaces to the company’s infrastructure offerings.

“It’s our most advanced, cloud-based unified software management platform,” Skaugan said. “It integrates Truscale metering, remote deployment, our automated orchestration software and smarter support analytics covering all our products from edge to cloud.”

Since acquiring IBM’s server business, Lenovo has aggressively added its ThinkAgile storage, ThinkShield Security, and most recently, ThinkEdge portfolios.

Pund-IT’s Charles King

“In the eight years since the System x deal with IBM, Lenovo has grown from a client computing powerhouse into a mature provider of end-to-end business computing solutions, including market-leading HPC and hyperscale systems,” noted Pund-IT principal analyst Charles King, in a blog.

“Within our engineering and development groups, we’ve been working for the last several years delivering the breadth of this new product portfolio with a new in-house ODM plus design model and in-house manufacturing,” Skaugan said. “What this means is we’re now designing our own motherboards at Lenovo, and systems for not just the hyperscale market, but for the general-purpose market. And we’re manufacturing them around the world, from Mexico to Hungary to China.”

Expanded Infrastructure Portfolio

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.

Kamran Amini, VP and general manager for Lenovo server, storage and software-defined infrastructure, said customers would see 70% faster analytic performance when used with financial applications. When used for AI modeling development, customers will see a 2x boost in performance compared with the current line of servers, he said.

Amini said the portfolio would cover a broad range of organizations, from SMBs to the largest enterprises. For example, the new DE Series will provide NVMe flash storage that can scale to 1.8 petabytes of all-flash.

Lenovo’s Kamran Amini

“This delivers innovation of all NVMe to customers that want to deploy in sub-$20,000 range solutions,” Amini said.

Lenovo is also releasing 32 new ThinkAgile solutions, including its Microsoft Azure HCI and Azure Stack Hub systems. Also, Lenovo is releasing the new ThinkAgile FX hyper-converged powered by Nutanix and the new VMware vSAN-based ThinkAgile VX.

Channel Partner Enablement

Susan Blocher is CMO of the Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group. She said the company is preparing its channel organization for the new offerings.

Lenovo’s Susan Blocher

“We have partnered closely with them as a part of this announcement to build a repertoire of training, sales enablement, content, marketing — everything that our partners need to help them prepare and go to market around this amazing infrastructure, V3 portfolio and all of the new capabilities that we’re bringing,” Blocher said. “We’re very excited to really be leveraging that one Lenovo channel capability as a part of this launch.”

Skaugen emphasized the shift to the company’s One Lenovo channel-first initiative.

“Our customers don’t need to worry about being baited and shifted in us taking business direct,” he said. “That’s a key element of how we’re building trust with the channel.”