Lenovo Marks 30 Years Of ThinkSystem With Slew Of New Kit

Lenovo has a wave of over 50 products and services coming to coincide with the 30th anniversary of ThinkSystem servers, including AMD and Intel-based hardware, edge systems, storage arrays and a unified management platform.

This splurge of infrastructure kit and services comes amid the 30th anniversary of the ThinkSystem X86 server, Lenovo said, although Reg readers will be aware that the branding has only really existed since Lenovo's 2014 buy of IBM's X86 server division.

The new servers make up what Lenovo dubbed its Infrastructure Solutions V3 portfolio, comprising next generation ThinkSystem, ThinkAgile, and ThinkEdge servers. But there are also new DE Series storage systems, and the XClarity One management platform intended to provide admins with control, plus updated cooling options for the servers.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the new ThinkSystem servers appear to offer buyers the choice of running either AMD Epyc or Intel Xeon Scalable processors, both shipping with DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.0 I/O.

This implies the systems will be based on the upcoming next-gen processors from the two chipmakers, the Genoa fourth-gen Epyc chips in AMD's case and Sapphire Rapids in Intel's case, as existing server CPUs do not have support for these technologies.

Additionally, Lenovo said it has lined up enhancements in its Neptune cooling technologies for the new ThinkSystem V3 boxes, specifically a liquid-to-air (L2A) hybrid cooling option that can be deployed "just like an air-cooled server," according to Kamran Amini, VP and GM for Server, storage and software-defined Infrastructure.

There is a new liquid-to-liquid cooling option for high-density solutions, supported in the ThinkSystem SR630 V3, Amini said. Lenovo’s ThinkAgile V3 boxes are the company's hyperconverged systems for private cloud deployments, and there are 32 new SKUs here. The ThinkAgile MX and SXM are certified for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI and Azure Stack Hub, while ThinkAgile HX are designed for the Nutanix platform and ThinkAgile VX boxes are for VMware vSAN.

Three new Optimized Infrastructure Solutions for specific deployment scenarios were announced; ThinkAgile MX for Microsoft Azure SQL, ThinkAgile MX for Microsoft Azure Backup and Recovery and ThinkAgile MX for Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop.

Lenovo has four new ThinkSystem DE Series storage arrays as part of this wave of products, comprising the DE6400F and DE6600F all-flash boxes and the DE6400H and DE6600H hybrid arrays, with the all-flash units scaling to 1.8PB of capacity, the company said.

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For admins, Lenovo has an updated version of its management platform, XClarity One, which is intended as a unified administration tool spanning from the datacenter to the edge.

This was designed as a cloud-based SaaS platform, Amini said, but Lenovo will apparently also make available an on-premise deployment option for those customers that want this. XClarity One allows customers to deploy and manage systems remotely, and is claimed to offer up to three times faster on-boarding.

We intended to share with readers more detail regarding this wave of products and services from Lenovo, but the company told us that hardware specifications are not yet available, and details regarding availability of all the products are also to be announced at a later date.

However, Lenovo did hint that more details might be disclosed at its upcoming Lenovo Tech World event for customers next month. ®