Lenovo is unveiling eight new servers using the just-announced Intel Ice Lake processors, with four of them representing specialized use cases, and expanding the portfolio of Lenovo servers with Neptune liquid cooling.
Kamran Amini, Vice President and General Manager of Infrastructure Solutions Platforms, at Lenovo ISG
Today, Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group [ISG] – the recently renamed Lenovo DCG – is announcing eight new servers using the new 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, which Intel also announced today. Four of them are general purpose servers, while four are specialized ones for very specific use cases.
“With the recent AMD Gen 3 launch, we announced 10 new products, and now with the Intel launch, we are introducing 8 new platforms,” said Kamran Amini, Vice President and General Manager of Infrastructure Solutions Platforms, at Lenovo ISG. “Our CPU partners deliver innovation and we take their architecture and drive further innovation with additional innovation from Lenovo. This is a testament to our engineering team, to go through COVID and deliver 18 new solutions. We are even shipping early, to customers who are looking for such solutions.”
The four new general purpose servers are the ThinkSystem SR650 V2, SR630 V2 rack servers, the ST650 V2 tower server, and the SN550 V2 blade server.
“These general purpose platforms go across a variety of different use cases,” Amini said. “All four systems have up to a 42% increase in cores.”
The ThinkSystem SR650 V2 is a 2U 2 socket server designed for expansion and scalability, to cover the breadth of the market from the SMB to large enterprises and managed cloud service providers. It has up to 60% greater GPU density, and with Intel Optane persistent memory 200 series, up to 2.7x increased memory capability.
The ThinkSystem SR630 V2 is a smaller 1U two-socket model, designed for hybrid data center workloads such as cloud, virtualization, analytics, computing and gaming. It also receives the Optane benefits of the increased memory capacity.
The ThinkSystem SN550 V2 is the new enterprise blade server in the Flex System family, designed for business-critical workloads like cloud, server virtualization, databases and VDI.
“It features EDSFF, new form factor technology with allows up to 3x more drives,” Amini said. “It opens up the envelope for many customers who like the blade form factor but needed more density. The EDSFF is also in the rack servers as well.”
The tower server is the ThinkSystem ST650 V2, a two-socket 4U model designed to provide support in ROBO locations, while optimizing workloads.
“It has more capability for customers who want to run multiple remote branches on a single server,” Amini stated.
The four specialized servers are for customers who want massive density or accelerators.
The ThinkSystem SD650 V2 is the fourth generation of the Lenovo Neptune platform, direct warm-water water-cooling technology for GPUs, which uses a copper loop and cold plate architecture to remove up to 90% of the systems heat. It is built for compute-intensive workloads such as HPC, AI, cloud, grid and advanced analytics.
“It takes more thermal out without having to have any fans in the system, and is especially important where energy is very expensive,” Amini said. “People have thought that warm water cooling was just for supercomputers, but it is now being deployed more in enterprises because of issues of air cooling.”
The ThinkSystem SD650-N V2 also uses the Neptune technology, and is designed for even more powerful use cases. It combines two 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors with four NVIDIA A100 GPUs to deliver maximum performance in a dense 1U package, that can deliver up to 3 PFLOPS per rack.
The ThinkSystem SD630 V2 is an ultra-dense 2U 4 node server, which leverages Lenovo Neptune Thermal Transfer Modules to support processors up to 250W, driving 1.5 times the performance of the previous generation in the same rack space.
The ThinkSystem SR670 V2 is an acceleration platform, designed for HPC and AI training workloads, and supports the NVIDIA Ampere datacenter GPU portfolio. It has six base configurations that support up to eight small or large form factor GPUs, one of which features a Lenovo Neptune liquid to air heat exchanger that provides the benefits of liquid cooling without the adding plumbing.
“The SR670V2 is one of the most dense form factors in the market, with up to 8 GPUS in a 3U form factor,” Amini said. “It provides a massive amount of GPU accelerators for AI training.”
Amini also stressed the unique IP that Lenovo brings to the table, which will differentiate it from the dozens of other OEMs who will also be using the new Intel processors.
“We automatically enable it with our TruScale flexible consumption model – on day one – which not all our competitors can do,” he said
He also highlighted the extension of the Neptune technology to additional platforms.
“Extending our warm water cooling will save customers tons of money and energy,” he said.
Amini also emphasized the importance of Lenovo ThinkShield and Hardware Root-of-Trust for enhanced security, hybrid cloud data management beyond the CPU aspects of the discussion, and Lenovo XClarity for edge to cloud management orchestration and security.
“We are also taking Intel Optane technology and exporting it to other technologies, where they make sense, beyond SAP HANA, where we put it first,” Amini said. “We have also extended accelerator capability by tying it to PCIe Gen 4.”
