Server system supplier Lenovo is partnering WEKA to resell its file services software integrated with ThinkSystem servers into high performance AI and analytics workloads for the finance, genomics, life science, media and entertainment application markets.
Lenovo has introduced a set of ThinkSystem SDS Ready Nodes with broad configuration choices, including the latest Intel and AMD processors, Nvidia GPUs, NVMe drives, and fast networking devices. They will be combined with WEKA Data Platform software to deliver a scalable and high performance file data management system. Validated WEKA Ready Node systems can be quickly deployed for all scale-out workloads resulting in a faster time to production.
Roberto Fabbretti director of the Computing and Research Support Division at the University of Lausanne, provided a customer quote about this partnership between the two vendors: “We use Lenovo ThinkSystem servers with WEKA Data Platform software as the foundation for our high-performance computing environment for the processing of sensitive data.”
“The processing of medical or sensitive data is subject to increasingly stringent legal and technical constraints. We find these two partners to be particularly attentive to these issues and are among the few providers of products that can combine very high performance with strong data security.”
Customers buying the WEKA-integrated ThinkSystem SDS Ready Nodes can use hybrid on-premises and public cloud resources for cloud bursting and scaling.
Lenovo, which OEMs NetApp storage hardware and software, enters a new market with WEKA, and gives WEKA a sales channel into 160 countries. Kamran Amini, Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group VP and GM of Server & Storage, said: “This partnership is an important next step in enabling more customers to seamlessly leverage AI, analytics, and machine learning (ML) to advance their businesses.”
The ThinkSystem SDS Ready Node servers tested, optimized and certified with the WEKA Data Platform include the SR630 V2 2-socket, 1U, Ice Lake Xeon + Optane PMEM) SR635 V2 (1-socket, 1U, AMD EPIC 7002), SR650 V2 (2-socket, 2U, Ice Lake Xeon) and SR655 V2 (1-socket, 2U, AMD EPIC 7002 and 7003).
Lenovo’s third generation (V3) ThinkSystem servers use Gen 4 Sapphire Rapids Xeons and are not yet included in the WEKA partnership systems. They include the SR630 V3 and SR650 V3. We expect these Sapphire Rapids V3 ThinkSystems will be added to the Levovo-WEKA list. This partnership is all about delivering the highest possible scale-out parallel file system performance and Sapphire Rapids processors will give it an extra kick.
Read more about the Lenovo-WEKA partnership here.
