Lenovo Targets Data Centre And PC Market With Expanded Portfolio

Lenovo relaunches its data centre ambitions with the expansion of its server portfolio, and the arrival of two sector-specific brands.

The PC maker says that its new data centre portfolio is made up of two new brand names, namely ThinkSystem (Xeon-based servers, storage, networking systems) and ThinkAgile (software-defined solutions based on ThinkSystem platforms).

It comes as the Chinese firm also touted new PC products for the business community, with the ‘world’s smallest workstation’ and a simplified ‘PC as a Service’ offering.

Data Centre Expansion

According to Lenovo, the core of its expanded data centre portfolio is its range of Intel Xeon Scalable processor-based servers, storage and networking systems, which will be available this summer.

These ThinkSystem products are combined with ThinkAgile to deliver a solution that is capable of dealing with data analytics as well as “high performance computing, artificial intelligence and the largest hyperscale environments.”

Lenovo said the expansion of its data centre portfolio is intended to help “customers to harness the power of the ‘intelligence revolution’.”

“Today’s announcements mark a significant day in the next phase of Lenovo’s commitment to advancing the data centre customer experience,” explained Kirk Skaugen, President of Lenovo Data Centre Group.

“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 centre solutions represent the most reliable, most agile, and highest performing data centre solutions in the industry.”

Lenovo says that it has “completely redesigned” the ThinkSystem portfolio under the new brand name, to help firms adapting to changing IT requires, whilst at the same time reducing complexity and costs created by silos in traditional IT.

It said that it has removed customer concerns about ‘vendor lock-in’ as it has “engineered the ThinkSystem portfolio to work seamlessly with an organisation’s previous investments, without the need to completely re-architect the data centre.”

The Lenovo ThinkAgile portfolio meanwhile should help customers obtain new IT systems more quickly, and help system admins with the simplified management of cloud services. Lenovo said that its pre-integrated, pre-built and pre-tested offerings will help customer data centres as they include “automated lifecycle management, decreased TCO and reduced need for IT resources to maintain the platform.”

For example, 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.

Lenovo also pointed to its delivery of the MareNostrum 4 supercomputer to an university in Spain as evidence of its server expertise.

Business PCs

Meanwhile Lenovo is not forgetting its core PC market, after it revealed two new PC offerings for the business community.

The ThinkStation P320 Tiny is being touted as the world’s smallest workstation with ISV certification, and it comes with the latest Intel Core i processors and NVIDIA Quadro Graphics, for those businesses where space is at a premium.

The machine itself costs $799 (£630) and is being touted as easy to set up and offers “big business-ready power in the smallest of packages.”

Lenovo also said that it has simplified its PC as a Service (PCaaS) offerings. These are fully-managed PCs that comes with a fixed monthly cost subscription model.

This PCaaS is designed for those system admins who struggle to make purchasing decisions, and it should help eliminate the burden of deploying and managing computing assets.

Lenovo believes this service is the ultimate ‘agile computing’ solution, and it allows businesses to select a range of machines including tablets, laptops, desktops, workstations or software and services.

“The workspace is evolving and so is our PCSD business,” said Christian Teismann, GM at the Commercial Business Segment. “ThinkStation P320 Tiny and PCaaS are just two solutions within our tool kit we are launching to help IT organisations transform. PCs will continue to be the integral component of the personalised computing future.”

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