These new data management solutions include new Storage Arrays that make it easier for organizations to enable AI workloads.
Stuart McRae, Executive Director and GM, Data Storage, at Lenovo
Today, Lenovo is announcing a series of new and enhanced products across four lines, with a new series, the Lenovo ThinkSystem DG Enterprise Storage Arrays, a new Lenovo ThinkSystem DM3010H hybrid storage solution, a new Lenovo Unified Complete Software suite, and new Lenovo ThinkAgile servers, which are integrated systems for the Microsoft Azure Stack Hub.
“This continues our journey in storage,” said Stuart McRae, Executive Director and GM, Data Storage, at Lenovo. “We invested in this space about five years ago. We have grown our business about 5x in that time frame, and #IDC has us in the #1 position in the sub-25k space.”
There are four new product areas in total, which include a new family, the Lenovo ThinkSystem DG Enterprise Storage Arrays.
“The DG series flagship announcement comes in 5000 and 7000: series models,” McRae said. “These All-Flash Arrays complement our DM and DE series, and have Quad-level Cell [QLC] architecture, with 6x faster IOPs performance compared to HDD arrays. Our goal is to replace legacy hard drive systems, and these provide higher performance and better density.”
A new entry in the Lenovo ThinkSystem DM series is the Lenovo ThinkSystem DM3010H hybrid storage solution, which replaces an older model, the DM3000.
“The DM 3010H is more in our entry segment for storage,” McRae indicated. “A lot of them go into edge use cases, particularly around the remote edge, as well as backup and archive and replication use cases.”
Still, McRae pointed out that it would not be accurate to view the DM3010, as serving the true low end of the market.
“We have been very successful in the sub 25,000 space, but most of the DM series plays above that,” he said. “We do sometimes tend to use the terms SMB and midmarket interchangeably. The midmarket has been a great consolidation space for us with the DM series, and we expect that the DG will be similar, although the DG will start at about 120 TB of capacity because it is QLC architecture.” The DM3010H has great scalability, up to 27.6 PB, to provide exceptional flexibility for a wide range of workloads, including file services, virtualization, backup and archive and other I/O applications.
“We also look at AI in a couple different areas which are relevant to these systems,” McRae added. “For large training models, the higher end DM series is used, as well as high performance scale out and file system performance and for the edge. The DM will also continue to be unified file, block and object, and delivers the best performance in that space. The DG series has a little less performance, but has large capacity consolidation for workloads.”
Both the new DG and new DM solutions use the new Lenovo Unified Complete Software suite. This unified management software provides customers with out-of-the-box features, including built-in ransomware protection, multi-tenant key management and immutable file copies that eliminate the ability for ransomware to change the file.
“We have had immutable snapshots, but it was extra cost before,” McRae said. “Now all of the ransomware capabilities and hybrid cloud management come standard with that, with no license keys and fees. All of the existing features of this software will be a free upgrade with our Unified Complete Software. Our mission with this is to make good backup policies easier.”
Finally the fourth part of the new announcement is new Lenovo ThinkAgile SXM4600 and SXM6600 Servers, which are integrated systems for the Microsoft Azure Stack Hub.
“These have Generation 4 Eagle Stream Intel CPUs, and replace the 4400 and 6400 servers in the MX line,” McRae indicated. They provide up to a 77% increase in transactional database performance and up to 3 to 1 consolidation for Microsoft applications compared to Dell Gen 14 / HPE Gen 10 platforms. They are also designed with full-stack lifecycle management, native Azure integration and extend applications across public and private clouds.
“This is not our first Azure stack, although until now we have seen more adoption in Europe than in Canada and the US,” McRae said.
