Lenovo today announced a bevy of updates to its server portfolio that expand the number of options organizations have when it comes to bundling stacks of software with Lenovo hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platforms to reduce the total cost of on-premises IT.
For example, Lenovo in collaboration with Nutanix and AMD, today launched a Lenovo ThinkAgile HX HCI based on AMD EPYC processors, which promises to reduce by 50% the number of servers required to run the Nutanix HCI software stack.
Lenovo in collaboration with Microsoft today also unveiled Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Azure Stack HCI Edge appliance based on Azure Stack HCI software. That platform runs the same software stack on-premises that Microsoft employs in its Azure cloud to simplify hybrid cloud computing environments.
In addition, Lenovo added a Diamanti SR630 appliance to its lineup based on storage software developed by Diamanti optimized for instances of Kubernetes running on bare-metal servers.
Finally, Lenovo in collaboration with VMware added a Lenovo ThinkAgile VX HCI offering that comes bundled with SAP HANA databases running on top of VMware vSphere.
Kamran Amini, vice president and general manager of server, storage and software-defined infrastructure for the Lenovo Data Center Group, said rather than optimizing HCI infrastructure for one single platform such as VMware, the Lenovo portfolio is designed to provide IT organizations with the flexibility to enable organizations to deploy stacks of Nutanix, Microsoft, Kubernetes or VMware software as they best see fit.
The economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic has been especially challenging for providers of IT infrastructure platforms deployed in local data centers that many IT teams have been not been able to visit in recent months. However, those IT teams have been relying more on the ability to manage Lenovo servers remotely rather than attempting to migrate existing application workloads to the cloud overnight, he noted.
It’s too early to say what the impact COVID-19 will have had on IT strategies. While many new applications are being deployed in the cloud, there is still a plethora of performance, security and compliance requirements that make it preferable to deploy some classes of workloads in on-premises IT environments. After more than a decade of having public clouds available as an option, the bulk of application workloads in the enterprise continue to run in on-premises IT environments. If it remains relatively simple to remotely manage those systems from home, the pressure to lift and shift workloads to the cloud becomes less intense.
Amini said the COVID-19 pandemic essentially served as a wake-up call for organizations to modernize IT management processes using platforms that are designed to be managed from anywhere.
Now that it’s apparent many IT teams will be working remotely a lot more often, many organizations are revisiting their IT strategies. There’s no doubt public clouds will play a larger role in IT going forward. However, the future of IT in general and cloud computing in particular will be, if anything, more hybrid than ever.
