At Lenovo's TRANSFORM event held in New York on June 20, the company unveiled an end-to-end data center portfolio that enables customers to harness the power of the "intelligence revolution" and create a strong technology foundation that supports transformative capabilities such as data analytics, high-performance computing, hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Lenovo introduced its largest, most comprehensive portfolio of server, storage, networking, software and data center services, as well as a new set of brands poised to take this leading position in customer satisfaction to even greater heights: ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile. The new portfolio of Lenovo solutions will be available in summer 2017.
"Today's announcements mark a significant day in the next phase of Lenovo's commitment to advancing the data center customer experience," said Kirk Skaugen, President of Lenovo Data Center Group speaking at the event.
"Our leadership in x86 server customer satisfaction and x86 server reliability, along with these new ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile brands, and Lenovo's new portfolio of data center solutions represent the most reliable, most agile, and highest performing data center solutions in the industry. We are confident we can empower our customers to solve their most challenging business problems and become digital disrupters in their own industries."
This year, Lenovo celebrates 25 years of proven Think quality, performance and reliability, and Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile data center solutions provide organizations with fluid resources that can adapt to the evolving needs of a business. According to a recent IDC survey of CIOs and technology leaders, 72 percent of respondents cited supporting digital transformation and business growth as the leading rationale in IT infrastructure decisions.
In the past three years, hybrid cloud significantly matured, while software defined architectures and hyperconverged infrastructure have disrupted the status quo for IT infrastructure in larger businesses, according to Lenovo. In response to these changes, customers face challenges including evolving their infrastructure strategies and considering how to best enable them now and for the future.
The new completely redesigned ThinkSystem portfolio by Lenovo, based on Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, brings the gold-standard for the industry under a single unified brand spanning servers, storage and networking systems.
ThinkAgile is a completely new software-defined solutions portfolio built on the foundation of Lenovo ThinkSystem platforms: it adapts to changing IT needs while reducing complexity and cost created by silos in traditional IT. Even better together, the ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile portfolios empower customers to create the foundation of a future-defined data center with "simplicity, agility and flexibility, and future-proofed preparation."
Often, customers find the price for technological advancement and advanced IT capabilities are complexity and confusion, according to Lenovo. The new ThinkSystem portfolio of servers, storage and networking solutions allows customers to address these concerns by giving them the ability to streamline IT infrastructure; this leads to increased service levels of data center operations that tie directly to business growth.
The ThinkSystem portfolio is engineered to work seamlessly with an organization's previous investments, without the need to completely re-architect the data center. In addition, with the Lenovo ThinkAgile portfolio, integrated solutions adapt to changing IT and business needs by delivering the speed, simplified management and agility of cloud services while retaining the much-valued control and governance of on-premises IT.
Its pre-integrated, pre-built and pre-tested offerings deliver "robust new capabilities" to customers' data centers, including automated lifecycle management, decreased TCO and reduced need for IT resources to maintain the platform. These solutions include the ThinkAgile SX series for Microsoft Azure Stack, as well as the ThinkAgile SX rack level solutions that integrate networking with hyperconverged offerings for a seamless customer experience.
Also, with the pace of technology innovation continuing to accelerate, customers will increasingly require the flexibility to adjust to changes and ensure the infrastructure they implement today stays relevant for their future needs. Lenovo designed the ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile solutions, such as the ThinkSystem SD530 high-performance computing offering, to support workloads spanning large data analytics applications to high performance computing, artificial intelligence and the largest hyperscale environments.
Lenovo is "committed to delivering transformational experiences for both its customers and the industry" and also announced the delivery of one of the most powerful systems - among the first in the world based on Intel Xeon Platinum processor family - to Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).
The BSC MareNostrum 4 supercomputer, tasked with jobs in science and engineering research, incorporates 48 racks with more than 3,400 nodes with next generation Intel Xeon processors and a central memory of 390 Terabytes. Its peak power will be over 11 Petaflop/s, allowing the center to test and analyze the performance of the most recent developments in the field of supercomputing.
"The newly launched x86 ThinkSystem platform provides us with ten times more processing power than the previous MareNostrum supercomputer, allowing BSC to continue the type of scientific research that enhances humanity's efforts to seek new knowledge and drive progress. Our experience with Lenovo has been easy and tightly integrated to overcome our challenges and achieve success, and we look forward to future collaboration," said Sergi Girona, Operations Director, BSC.