Lenovo Group has unleashed a wave of new storage solutions and arrays specifically aimed at helping customer gain control over the complexity of AI data operations and support real-time reasoning applications.
A total of 21 new systems span both Lenovo’s ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile server models. The company promises a substantial increase in performance for AI inferencing, AI workload consolidation, and much faster deployment, all while reducing the total cost of ownership, according to the vendor.
Key innovations include turnkey AI Starter Kits, the industry’s first liquid cooled HCI appliances and converged hybrid cloud and virtualization solutions. The Data Storage Solutions are fine-tuned for easy deployment, faster inferencing and workload consolidation.
Lenovo claims the new generation of ThinkSystems Storage Arrays provide a three-fold performance boost over prior generations to accelerate actionable data-based insights for business operations. When compared to older storage systems with mechanical 10k RPM drives, they offer 97% greater energy savings and a 99% density improvement, Lenovo stated.
Lenovo says that while the new ThinkAgile and ThinkSystems servers are purpose-built to support any kind of task relating to AI, chiefly for inference, they are also tuned for more traditional server operations like databases, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, hybrid cloud, backup and archives.
Beyond the standard arrays, the company also unveiled a series of hyperconverged ThinkAgile and ThinkSystem hybrid cloud virtualization systems, designed to provide flexible, independent scaling of compute and storage.
These systems are aimed at enterprises that want to use both AI and virtualized systems, since AI hardware is not virtualized but bare-metal. For example, the all-new Lenovo ThinkAgile Converged Solution for VMware, which combines the enterprise-class features of the ThinkAgile VX Series with the data-management capabilities of the ThinkSystem DG Series storage arrays in a single package, Lenovo stated.
For high-performance AI reasoning applications, Lenovo’s new ThinkAgile HX Series GPT-in-a-Box solution claims to be the industry’s first liquid-cooled hyperconverged infrastructure appliance and is built in partnership with Nutanix.
The new ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile offerings are also designed with integrated data security and resiliency features to reduce operational risk and provide greater data protection. This includes tamper-proof snapshots, software-based encryption and AI-powered autonomous ransomware protection, with machine learning models to proactively detect and mitigate attacks, according to Lenovo.
The Lenovo Data Storage Solutions also feature Lenovo’s XClarity systems management software support, giving administrators comprehensive security features to ensure management, encryption, compliance, and communication for all managed storage solutions.