Lenovo refreshes data centre portfolio

In today’s business landscape, CIOs face many challenges: IT spend is increasing while the talent pool is shrinking, enterprises must remain relevant today while innovating for tomorrow, security is more important than ever before and the industry is evolving from a hardware purchase to consumption-based model. To help CIOs navigate this path and manage the ever-increasing amount of data they face, Lenovo is updating 15 ThinkSystem servers and five ThinkAgile appliances in the portfolio to include Intel’s newest processors, providing double-digit increases in performance. Additionally, with Intel Optane DC persistent memory, customers can experience 12.5 times faster recovery from planned or unplanned outages (from 50 minutes down to four minutes) and can process significantly more data in in-memory databases, making the solutions ideal for SAP HANA environments.

“Customers today need IT solutions that are built to handle a diverse set of applications and engineered to accelerate workloads for improved business outcomes. Lenovo’s new ThinkSystem servers featuring Intel Optane DC persistent memory are revolutionizing how customers think about application use cases, particularly how they manage their large memory challenges and higher availability of their applications,” said Kamran Amini, Vice President and General Manager, Data Center Infrastructure and Software-Defined Solutions at Lenovo Data Center Group. “These new Lenovo solutions with persistent memory allow for more data and virtual machines to be stored on a single platform, and for mission critical applications like SAP HANA, they deliver much faster recovery of the data from a planned or unplanned outage. This helps reduce a customer’s overall operating expenses and enables further resiliency within their IT environment.”

“The amount of available data and its importance to business continues to skyrocket,” said Lisa Spelman, Vice President and General Manager of Intel Xeon Processors and Data Center Marketing at Intel. “Workload optimized platforms equipped with 2^nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Optane DC persistent memory are the tools customers require to thrive in this data-centric era. Intel and Lenovo closely collaborated to enable platforms with up to 8-sockets and over 30TB of memory to help our customers take on their biggest data challenges.”

Customers and partners across many industries with wide ranging workloads have been anticipating the new Lenovo solutions and are eager to deploy the systems.

“With our new ThinkSystem servers, research teams will be able to generate results faster, enabling new discoveries and breakthroughs,” said Ian Fisk, Ph.D., Scientific Computing Core Co-Director at Simons Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides funding for research in mathematics and the basic sciences. “These new systems deliver even faster processing speeds than previous generations. Lenovo’s reputation as a leader in high performance computing, and their ability to deliver the servers just days after the new Intel processors became commercially available were real differentiators to us in our selection process.”

One industry in particular where faster processing speeds are imperative is financial services. In the financial markets, where datastreams can update millions of times per second, the ability to analyze large volumes of data fast enough to react to changing markets is essential. The STAC-M3™ benchmark is an industry standard used to compare technology stacks suitable for managing financial time-series data. As part of today’s refresh announcement, Lenovo – along with KX – is unveiling new record-breaking STAC-M3 benchmark results with its flagship ThinkSystem SR950 and SR650 servers featuring Intel Optane™ DC persistent memory.

“Over the past few months Lenovo, Intel and Kx have used Intel Optane technology to set several new STAC-M3 records for systems running kdb+ on a single server,” said Peter Lankford, Founder and Director, STAC. “Now, the baseline STAC-M3 results from Lenovo servers using Intel Optane DC persistent memory have set new records in 11 of 17 benchmarks for kdb+ systems using a 2-socket server and 9 of 17 benchmarks for kdb+ systems using a 4-socket server. In one specific example, the calculation of market statistics that used to take more than half a second on a 2-socket kdb+ system now takes less than 75 milliseconds on the new solution—a speed acceleration of more than 7x.”

“Today’s STAC-M3 results represent significant improvement for customers demanding higher performance with their in-memory trade analytics with Kx. What will be of particular interest to our customers is that we gained these improvements without making any structural changes to our code. We simply took advantage of the Intel Optane DC persistent memory being used to hold persisted historical data,” said Glenn Wright, Senior Systems Architect at Kx. “The kdb+ database, combined with Intel Optane DC persistent memory and Lenovo ThinkSystem servers, again produced record-breaking results with the I/O-intensive and compute-intensive STAC-M3 benchmark, setting a new set of expectations for performance.”

In addition to the new ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile portfolio additions, Lenovo is also developing a series of engineered solutions designed specifically for key workloads. Three of these (SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server and Red Hat OpenShift Containers) will be verified by Intel as Intel Select Solutions, taking advantage of the 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor, signifying superior workload performance, ease of deployment and simplified evaluation. Lenovo continues to be the industry leader in this program, offering more Intel Select Solutions than any other vendor. In the coming months, Lenovo also expects to introduce additional Intel Select Solutions utilizing the 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processor including VMware vSAN, Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI), Blockchain Hyperledger Fabric, & Microsoft Azure Stack HCI.