Lenovo has released 21 storage products, including a liquid-cooled HCI system, in a major storage portfolio refresh aimed at customers building AI-focused infrastructure.
Scott Tease, Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Product Group VP and GM, talked of helping “businesses harness AI’s transformative power,” stating: “The new [systems] help customers achieve faster time to value no matter where they are on their IT modernization journey with turnkey AI solutions that mitigate risk and simplify deployment.”
Marco Pozzoni, Director, EMEA Storage Sales at Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, stated: “Our largest-ever data storage portfolio refresh delivers the performance, efficiency, and data resiliency required by Data Modernization and Enterprise AI workloads.”
Lenovo says “businesses are moving to a disaggregated infrastructure model, turning compute, storage, and networking into on-demand, shared resources that can adapt to changing needs to boost scalability, efficiency, and flexibility.” New AI Starter Kits for Lenovo Hybrid AI Platform are pre-configured and validated infrastructure systems comprising compute, storage, GPUs and networking. The storage elements are new ThinkSystem Series Storage Arrays, OEMed from NetApp, delivering unified file, block, and object storage using “high-performance SSD flash technology.”
The ThinkSystem DG and DM arrays feature include new AI-powered autonomous ransomware protection – ONTAP ARP/AI – plus encryption for greater data protection and synchronous replication with transparent failover.
There are five areas of Lenovo storage product portfolio change:
- ThinkAgile SDI V4 Series provides full-stack, turnkey solutions that simplify IT infrastructure and accelerate computing for data-driven reasoning.
- New ThinkSystem Storage Arrays deliver up to 3x faster performance while reducing power consumption – comparing the DE4800F to the DE4000 – and providing up to 97 percent energy savings and 99 percent density improvement for the DG7200 over a Lenovo device featuring 10K HDDs for smaller data center footprints and lower TCO and when upgrading legacy infrastructure.
- New converged ThinkAgile and ThinkSystem hybrid cloud and virtualization systems deliver flexible and efficient independent scaling of compute and storage capabilities, reducing software licensing costs for additional storage, but not core-based licenses, up to 40 percent. A ThinkAgile Converged Solution for VMware brings together the enterprise-class features of ThinkAgile VX Series – lifecycle management and operational simplicity – , with the ThinkSystem DG Series storage arrays data-management to provide a unified [private] cloud platform supporting hybrid storage workloads.
- New ThinkAgile HX Series GPT-in-a-Box solutions featuring Lenovo Neptune Liquid Cooling leverage the industry’s first liquid cooled HCI appliance to deliver turnkey AI inferencing, from edge to cloud, yielding up to 25 percent energy savings for the HX V4 over the HX V3 generation.
- New AI Starter Kits for Lenovo Hybrid AI Platform deliver a validated, flexible, and easy on-ramp for enterprise inferencing and retrieval-augmented (RAG) workflows.
Lenovo partnered Nutanix in 2023 in order to sell GPT-in-a-Box-based ThinkAgile HX Series systems. There are no details available about the liquid-cooled system, with Lenovo saying it is a “full-stack generative AI solution [and] jumpstarts AI integration using a repeatable solution that lowers energy costs for faster data-powered AI reasoning.” It has “up to 2.6x higher transaction rate and up to 1.4x faster input/output operations per second (IOPs) compared to traditional cooling methodS,” specifically comparing ThinkAgile SDI V4 Series to 3 racks of Dell VxRail Cascade Lake models. It also has a more compact form factor with increases of up to 1.4x in Container/VM density over its ThinkAgile SDI V3 Series predecessor
The disk drive manufacturers more or less stopped selling 10,000rpm disk drives in the 2018-2019 era when capacities were limited at up to 2.4TB or so. Lenovo and its competitors continue to ship 10k drives up to 2.4TB. The DG7200 is an-QLC flash system supporting up to 120 SSDs in an HA pair; implying 61.66TB drives. The comparison with the older Lenovo array using 10,000rpm 2.4TB disk drives does not seem that appropriate.
Lenovo says that its “ThinkAgile SDI V4 Series and new ThinkSystem Storage Arrays deliver full-stack, turnkey AI-ready infrastructure for enterprises beginning AI implementations while delivering faster inferencing performance for LLM workloads.” The primary AI use cases include AI inferencing, RAG, and fine-tuning AI models, while “the offerings are purpose-built for a broad range of enterprise AI and data modernization workloads, from databases, ERP and CRM, to virtualization, hybrid cloud, backup and archive.” AI model training is not a primary AI use case.
Lenovo is in the process of buying Infinidat and that will give it an entry into the high-performance enterprise block storage array market. It will also provide it with its own storage IP and a different, enterprise-focussed, go-to-market sales channel.
You can dig around in Lenovo’s storage web pages here to find out more about today’s storage news.
