If garnering the full value of business information and data assets were important for companies prior to COVID-19, it will be absolutely imperative as businesses begin to recover and heal in the wake of the pandemic. How IT vendors respond to the needs of their customers and partners, and what innovations they offer to speed the process, will help determine how well organizations survive and succeed.
Those are points explored in a new blog by Kamran Amini, VP and GM of Lenovo’s Data Center Group (DCG), that considers modern business and market evolution, and how Lenovo is aiding “data-centered” enterprise customers with mission-critical high-performance data analytics (HPDA) systems. Let’s consider how Lenovo DCG is aiding its clients.
The driving force of business data
Amini prepares the ground for HPDA with some familiar discussion points. Continuing exponential information growth (with the global datasphere expected to quintuple in the next half-decade) is leaving organizations buried under the weight of increasingly unmanageable data assets. Successful businesses will be those that learn to successfully cope with and conquer those challenges.
But along with the difficulties of data volume, velocity and variety, companies are creating, capturing and storing information at the far edges of corporate networks and in public clouds. At the same time, increasingly digitized business processes make analyzing data in real time a make/break deal for companies, including online retailers, manufacturers and those employing complex supply chains.
Amini notes that modern business intelligence (BI) and analytics supporting real-time insights and decision making will be foundational elements for successful business practices. Moreover, those processes need to be employable wherever data assets reside, including on premises, at the network edge and in cloud environments.
Lenovo’s HPDA solutions
So, what is Lenovo DCG doing to help customers achieve these goals? According to Amini, high-performance data analytics marks the combination of data management, big data analytics and high-performance computing (HPC). This convergence is vitally important because traditional siloed storage and scale-out computing solutions often fall short when it comes to the demanding requirements of real-time analytics. Critical to getting real-time business insights is effectively curating massive data sets and then performing real-time analytics on the data.
That’s where Lenovo’s mission-critical servers come in, including the new “AI-ready” ThinkSystem SR850 V2 (a 2U solution featuring two to four CPUs based on the third-gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and optional Intel Optane memory) and the ThinkSystem SR860 V2 (a 4U solution featuring two to four third-gen Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs, as well as optional NVIDIA GPUs and Intel Optane memory).
According to Amini, these ThinkSystem offerings provide customers with notable expansion capabilities, guaranteed system uptime for data resiliency, and accelerated performance for AI, data analytics and VDI workloads via next-gen accelerators. Additional benefits include:
- up to 2X increased NVMe storage capacity (up to 24x NVMe drives) eliminating data bottlenecks for real-time analytics;
- up to 25% performance/price improvement via third-gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors;
- hyper-fast GPU capabilities with minimal latency with up to eight single-width (or four double-width) GPUs, including support for NVIDIA V100S with Tensor Core technology, as well as the T4 for single-precision workloads
Along with big-data analytics engines, such as Apache, Hadoop and Apache Spark, Lenovo’s HPDA solutions can support the recently announced SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, customer edition, an OPEX cloud service that enables customers to keep their SAP software landscape and data on-premises while gaining the benefits of a private-cloud experience.
Amini also noted that ThinkSystem SR850 V2 and SR860 V2 solutions, as well as other ThinkSystem server and storage solutions, are available through Lenovo’s TruScale Infrastructure Services, a subscription-based offering that allows customers to use and pay for data center hardware and services–on-premises or at a customer-preferred location—without having to purchase the equipment.
Final analysis
As enterprises begin moving beyond the “survival mode” thinking that has dominated IT and business strategy for much of 2020, many will find chosen markets and competitive dynamics considerably altered. Despite those differences, it will still be imperative for organizations to effectively manage business information and gain valuable, actionable insights from their data assets, often in real time.
These are goals companies can best pursue and achieve with the help of trustworthy, innovative data center vendors and partners. Lenovo is well aware of the current and future challenges businesses face across numerous global markets and is one of the few vendors that can provide the end-to-end solutions that modern enterprises require.
The new high-performance data analytics systems highlighted by Amini suggest that Lenovo DCG is doing everything in its power to ensure its customers’ survival and success.
Charles King is a principal analyst at PUND-IT and a regular contributor to eWEEK. © 2019 Pund-IT, Inc. All rights reserved.