Lenovo Launches New Servers, Expands AMD Partnership

Lenovo is launching two new single-socket server platforms in conjunction with AMD.

Lenovo on Wednesday announced the ThinkSystem SR635 and SR655 server platforms, which are available to all Lenovo channel partner programs. AMD powers the offerings with its EPYC 7002 Series processors.

“Lenovo’s endless pursuit of innovations to accelerate our customers’ intelligent transformation has been paramount in our rise to become one of the fastest growing data center OEMs in the world,” said Doug Fisher, Lenovo Data Center Group’s chief operating officer and senior vice president of business units. “Today Lenovo is expanding our AMD relationship with new, fully optimized solutions to help our joint customers address complex and data-intensive workloads, enabling them to do more with less while still providing uncompromised end-to-end security.”

The company said the new platforms boast a higher core count and faster memory speeds. Lenovo also states that SR635 and SR655  can reduce total cost of ownership by up to 46% and and software licensing costs by up to 73%. Company executives tell Channel Futures that the offerings help meet new use cases by handling larger workloads.

Financial vertical customers will be better equipped to perform high frequency trading and analytics thanks to the servers’ PCIe 4.0 capability, according to Lenovo, and health care professionals will have more GPU accelerators to run sophisticated image analysis and analytics.

Lenovo has made the SR635 and SR655 solutions immediately available through sales representatives and channel partners.

Lenovo’s Nicole Roskill

Nicole Roskill, executive director of global channels for Lenovo Data Center, said the two new AMD-based systems augment existing channel offerings and give partners a more robust portfolio. She said many Lenovo partners work with the uniquely challenging financial services, health care and manufacturing verticals.

“And with the addition of these two new offerings, this gives them a greater breadth of portfolio to help them address customer concerns and help customers achieve some of the intelligent transformation and other business problems they’re looking to solve,” Roskill said. “We think the strength of this is bringing a stronger, more complete portfolio that helps enable our customers to take advantage of clear market opportunity.”

She said Lenovo will use its incentive-based Expert Achievers program to help push the new offerings through the channel.

Roskill told Channel Futures earlier this year that she joined the company with the goal of achieving “greater scale with our partners.” The channel accounts for 80-85% of Lenovo’s global businesses but only about 50% in the U.S.

“They’re a critical route to market for us. We need more focus on partners as an extension of our own sales team and we need to think about how we support and engage partners, certainly as we’re focused on building out a more robust portfolio of offerings,” she told Lynn Haber in May. “Our partners have tremendous skill sets within their own organizations and our goal is to provide partners with a compelling portfolio on which they can layer their own IP and expertise, and their own unique offering in their market.