Enterprise networking major Lenovo on Monday announced the launch of new IT solutions – ahead of the annual Lenovo TechWorld event in San Francisco on June 9.
The main strategy of Lenovo is to enhance its offerings for the $87 billion data center technology market. Lenovo is unable to compete with enterprise networking leaders such as IBM, HPE, Dell, Cisco, among others due to lack of innovation.
The lack of focus and strong innovation in the enterprise business has prompted Lenovo to rename the Enterprise Business Group or EBG as the Data Center Group.
As a result, quarterly revenue of Lenovo’s enterprise business fell 8 percent to $1 billion.
Lenovo sells servers, storage, software and services under the Lenovo ThinkServer brand and System x business unit.
The good news is that the China-based Lenovo generated revenues of $4.6 billion (+73 percent) in 2015 — driven by hyperscale wins in its home turf. Without establishing its presence in the U.S. and some of the European markets, Lenovo will not be able to generate economies of scale to sustain its investments in innovation.
For the sixth full quarter since the System x acquisition, EBG delivered positive operational pre-tax income with 1.7 percent operational margin, although its reported PTI – which included non-cash, M&A-related accounting charges – was negative $16 million.
Lenovo targets $87 bn data center space
StorSelect announced today is Lenovo’s Software Defined Storage (SDS) appliance program by integrating SDS software from Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) with Lenovo hardware in turnkey appliances.
The company said the integrated appliances with Lenovo support enable simple deployment of scalable storage solutions. Lenovo has tied up with Nexenta Systems for Storage DX8200N and Cloudian for DX8200C to ensure return on investment for storage solutions.
The DX8200N supports unified file and block storage for scale-up deployments leveraging three different technologies – all-flash, hybrid, and all spinning drives. The DX8200C object-based storage appliance is ideal for large scale-out deployments.
Lenovo also unveiled its first Lenovo-branded mid-range storage systems – new V-Series 12Gb SANs. The V3700 V2 and V5030 are hybrid and all-flash SAN solutions that help clients scale their IT operations to improve storage economics in their organizations.
The company also released its next-generation network operating system, Lenovo Cloud NOS, which offers new functionality that enhances resiliency, cloud-level scalability and programmability. It will be available for customer download starting on June 17.
Meanwhile, Lenovo and Juniper Networks signed a reseller agreement under which Lenovo will offer Juniper Networks’ EX2300 and EX4550 Ethernet Switches, as well as the QFX10002-72Q data center spine aggregation switch.
Lenovo refreshed its x3850 and x3950 X6 servers with new versions incorporating the latest Intel Xeon E7-4800 and E7-8800 v4 processors, which deliver up to 39% faster performance than the previous generation.
With memory support up to 12TB, these offerings are designed for mission-critical environments, such as in-memory applications like SAP HANA or Hadoop, as well as large virtualization projects, big data and analytics workloads.
Lenovo x3850 X6 and x3950 X6 offer fast performance, establishing 17 new industry performance benchmarks.
Lenovo’s 4-Socket x3850 X6 server using Intel Xeon E7-8890 v4 processors on Windows delivers more than 33 percent performance improvement over the previous-generation Lenovo system against the SAP SD 2-tier standard application benchmark.
These new servers enable expanded memory support to provide 33 percent more memory for SAP S/4HANA solutions in eight-socket, 8TB configurations with SAP HANA SPS12.
Lenovo launched ThinkServer sd350, an ultra-dense, 2U four node (2U4N) system designed for more demanding software defined workloads where maximum density and efficiency, as well as highly attractive ownership costs, are critical requirements.
Lenovo needs to spend more research and development to compete with US-based technology majors such as Cisco, HPE, IBM, etc.
Baburajan K
editor@infotechlead.com
