As data analysis becomes critical for business success, Lenovo’s ThinkSystem AI-ready servers will help partners address customers’ high-performance data analytics (HPDA) needs, the company says.
A blog post from Kamran Amini, vice president and general manager of server, storage and software defined infrastructure, Lenovo Data Center Group, explains that, as data grows at an unprecedented rate, it’s more difficult, not to mention time consuming and resource-intensive to analyze and uncover the valuable insights within.
“The challenge is that for customers running these workloads, traditional scale-out computing is not cost-effective, nor does it provide the performance needed to analyze data in real-time,” Amini says. “Customers with common data center platforms typically must make trade-offs between storage, memory and compute performance – and then decide which combination best suits their specific workload needs. Running these compute intensive workloads often not only requires the performance of HPC, but also demand the level of storage and memory capacity suited for Big Data,” he says.
Lenovo Server Innovation Helps Partners Address HPDA Challenges
Enter HPDA — the the convergence of big data and high-performance computing (HPC). Traditional big data analytics engines, such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, are excellent at storing and managing large amounts of unstructured data that can be mined for trends and insights, Amini says, however the speed and latency requirements of real-time analytics creates significant hurdles for traditional big data systems. These are exactly the challenges Lenovo’s ThinkSystem SR860 V2 and SR850 V2 AI-ready servers are built to address.
“Lenovo’s purpose-built designs are all about enabling customers to run and analyze massive data sets across the system memory while minimizing latency challenges to help offset the potential impact that can have on the bottom line,” Amini says. “For even greater performance, GPUs can be leveraged for ultra-fast data processing by loading entire datasets in the GPU memory and leveraging GPU acceleration for extremely fast processing. The added benefit of GPUs enables organizations to be AI-ready. These built in AI capabilities gives customers the ability to easily move beyond HPDA to complex artificial intelligence models,” he says.
Lenovo ThinkSystem SR860 V2 and SR850 V2 AI-Ready servers can help partners and their customers deliver real-time insights within HPDA workloads and incorporate AI into an enterprise environment, Amini says. The servers provide expansion capabilities, guarantee system uptime for superior data resiliency, and accelerate AI, data analytics and VDI workloads using next-generation accelerators, according to Lenovo.
Lenovo ThinkSystem SR860 V2 and ThinkSystem SR850 V2: Technical Specs
More specifically, Lenovo says the servers include up to 2X increased NVMe storage capacity; using up to 48x 2.5” SSDs (up to 24x NVMe drives inclusive in the 48 total drives) to eliminate data bottleneck for real-time analytics.
Using 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Gold 6328H processors, the ThinkSystem SR models could deliver up to 25 percent performance /$ improvement to enhance efficiency and ROI. The ThinkSystem SR servers also feature hyper-fast GPU processing capabilities with minimal latency using up to 8 single-width (or 4 double-width) GPUs, including support for NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs, as well as up to 3X maximum capacity per node for more scalable memory closer to the CPU and lower data latency compared to solid-state drive technology using Intel® Optane™ persistent memory (PMem) 200 series (24 DIMMs per system), resulting in a significant overall improvement in application performance, according to Lenovo.
Customers can also benefit from the 2- to 4-socket scalability and high-performance designs of Lenovo’s ThinkSystem SR860 V2 and SR850 V2 for SAP HANA workloads. The Lenovo ThinkSystem SR860 V2 has already achieved nine world- record SAP HANA benchmarks, Amini says.
Launched in June 2020, the ThinkSystem SR860 V2 and ThinkSystem SR850 V2 are currently available with flexible consumption and pricing models through Lenovo TruScale Infrastructure Services.
