Computing is and always has been about data, the “information” in IT. That is especially true in business organizations, where the earliest computing solutions focused on speeding and simplifying financial transactions and similar processes. Evolving technologies enable companies to access, manage, gain insights and profit from new forms of data, often gathered or created in remote locales. But doing so requires IT vendors to develop more robust and sophisticated tools for managing and analyzing that information.
These points underscore the value of the new storage systems, monitoring tools and management capabilities that Lenovo’s Data Center Group (DCG) recently announced. Working alone and with strategic partners, Lenovo has considerably expanded its business customers’ options for working with hybrid cloud, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). Let’s look at that more closely.
Data unification from edge to core to cloud
Business IT solutions have long supported location-specific use cases, including remote or branch offices (ROBOs) and public cloud platform services. However, the continuing growth in both the volume and varieties of information that companies work with tend to strain traditional IT offerings.
That is the case for the majority of organizations that choose to implement hybrid IT environments that access multiple cloud platforms. It is also true for newer, still evolving use cases, like edge computing which are expected to grow significantly with the introduction of robust 5G wireless technologies and networks.
Cohesively accessing and managing far flung data assets is challenging for most enterprises but is especially problematic for smaller to medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Those same organizations also face notable challenges when it comes to effectively analyzing ever-expanding information resources.
Lenovo DCG’s new solutions
These are some of the issues that Lenovo has addressed with its new data management offerings. They include,
- Lenovo ThinkSystem DM5100F, a new member of the company’s DM Series family, is an affordable all-NVMe storage system that offers high-performance low-latency features. DM Series systems now include S3 Object support, allow customers to manage and analyze all data types (block, file and object) within a single storage platform and perform cost-effective data analytics across data resources. The DMF 5100F also supports enhanced data protection capabilities, such as transparent failover and native object storage management. Additionally, Lenovo DM Series customers can add features, like cold-data tiering from hard drives to the cloud and data replication to the cloud, thus enabling a multi-cloud strategy for storage while reducing data management costs.
- Jolera, a multinational service provider, offered a testimonial describing how it has boosted storage deduplication rations from 3:1 to 4:1 with built-in tools included in Lenovo’s DM Series storage solutions and DE Series servers.
- Lenovo DB720S Fibre Channel Switch is a new generation offering for 32Gbps and 64Gbps storage networking, delivering higher speed and 50 percent lower latency than previous solutions. The DB720S also supports autonomous SAN infrastructures with self-learning, self-optimizing and self-healing capabilities, reducing downtime and simplifying storage network management.
- Lenovo ThinkSystem Intelligent Monitoring 2.0 software solution is a cloud-based management platform that simplifies and automates Lenovo ThinkSystem storage environments with AI-based tools and processes. The solution offers a single cloud-based interface to monitor and manage capacity and performance for multiple locations, predict issues before they happen and offer storage administrators prescriptive guidance.
- Reference Architecture for an AI training system is the result of a collaboration between Lenovo, NVIDIA and NetApp. The resulting entry-level solution is designed for enabling small and medium sized IT teams where most compute jobs are single node (single or multi-GPU) or distributed over a few computational nodes.
Final analysis
A continuing truth about business computing is that companies of every size and kind can benefit from ever more powerful and capacious IT solutions, some organizations lag or are simply left behind while others forge ahead. There are numerous reasons for these discrepancies, including lack of access to capital or experienced IT staff.
However, the best vendors are those who assist all sorts of organizations by developing solutions that can be used to address a wide variety of business workloads and use cases. That approach is clear in Lenovo’s new data management solutions which are designed to cost-effectively enhance storage performance while optimally supporting the access and analysis of business information wherever it resides, including hybrid cloud environments. In addition, the company’s collaboration with NVIDIA and NetApp is designed to ensure that even small and medium sized IT teams have access to powerful AI training tools and methodologies.
No business technology or IT vendor can guarantee that customers will succeed. However, Lenovo DCG’s new solutions underscore the company’s intention to provide its customers the computing solutions they and their businesses require.
Charles King is a principal analyst at PUND-IT and a regular contributor to eWEEK. © 2020 Pund-IT, Inc. All rights reserved.
