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Based on a discussion between:

• Louis Brunetto, Distribution Account Executive, Lenovo
• Aaron Rothfuss, Sr. Strategic Sales Leader, Lenovo
• Kirk Sinclair, Partner Sales Executive, OEM team (DPSS), Microsoft Canada
• Devlin Norris, Distribution Account Executive, Intel Corporation

Lenovo is one of the biggest partners selling ROK in the Canadian market. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at their role, their offerings, and how resellers can benefit from partnering with them.

What is the value of Lenovo ROK for channel partners?

Lenovo’s ROK offering provides the most advantages for any customer or partner who’s deploying Lenovo servers. The three biggest reasons for this are:

Ease of ordering

Lenovo can pre-configure solutions for you, which means it drops off at your customer site already configured with winders server 2019 installed.

Receiving a tuned image

When you receive the image, and if you decide to do the install yourself, Lenovo will have already tested and added their own drivers, not the out of the box windows drivers.

Fully stocked and cost effective

Lenovo works closely with Microsoft worldwide to ensure that they have best of class pricing and best of class availability on their products.

Lenovo offers unlimited support for the duration of your contract, however long that may be, no matter how many hours of support you need.

And Lenovo provides one point of contact for support, which is very convenient. Their ESS support team is based in Raleigh, NC, making it easy to get level 1 through level 3 support.

What are the performance benefits with Lenovo & Intel’s 3rd Gen Xeon?

Intel’s 3rd gen Xeon is being released now with Lenovo. There are major performance benefits with the Optane persistent memory. Optane can take common workloads and configurations and remarkably improve performance.

It’s based on 3D Xpoint, an architecture that Intel developed for almost 10 years before hitting the market. With it, even legacy storage devices and old applications get a significant boost.

Tips from Lenovo for software partners

Make sure you have the right licenses

Old licenses might not work in a new environment. As a solutions provider, Lenovo has specialists that understand all of the Microsoft licensing who can guide you.

Be sure to count your VMs

For a setup with multiple VMs, getting a license for Windows Server Datacenter Edition makes the most sense. It future-proofs you, allowing room to add more without the need to establish another new license for each new VM. Not only that, it allows you to utilize more technologies with more power and more functionality, including unlimited Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, unlimited OSEs/Windows Server Containers with Hyper-V isolation, and Software-defined networking and storage.

Volume of Server deployments in SMB

Currently, high volume racks and towers are moving the most, such as Think System, SR630s, SR650s, and SR250s. SR630 in particular is an excellent SMB box because it’s not overkill, and it’s just powerful enough to be versatile.

Promos & benefit programs for resellers

The Lenovo Infrastructure Solution Group partner program rewards partners for selling and engaging with them. Additionally, as an Intel Partner Alliance member, you will accrue points for all Lenovo servers that you ship through Ingram as well.

You can double dip on all of these programs, meaning that you can gain points from Ingram, Intel, Lenovo, and Microsoft at the same time. Ask your Ingram team how you can take full advantage of all the benefits available to you.

If you’re interested to know more, contact Ingram today and get all the help you need to get started.