Lenovo is delving further into the software-defined data center market with a new distributed storage solution for IBM Spectrum Scale. The company announced its scalable software-defined storage (SDS) product today at its Accelerate Partner Forum in Orlando, Florida, which runs through Wednesday.
The launch is part of a broader Lenovo channel partner strategy to emphasize desktop, server and data center opportunities for VARs. Lenovo said its Distributed Storage Solution for IBM Spectrum Scale (DSS-G) enables customers to manage the exponential rate of data growth and the need to store large amounts of structured and unstructured data.
It is the first step in executing Lenovo’s goal of bringing the benefits of SDS to high-performance computing (HPC) clusters.
“The Lenovo HPC solutions are part of research projects focused on solving humanity’s most complex challenges,” Madhu Matta, vice president and general manager of HPC and artificial intelligence (AI), said in a statement. “One in every five supercomputers in the world is built on Lenovo HPC offerings.”
New Features and Capabilities
As HPC, AI, analytics and cloud technologies reshape the data center, DSS-G is intended to accelerate the adoption of software-defined data center technology, according to Lenovo. It supports "dense scalable file and object storage for high-performance and data-intensive environments."
Built on Lenovo’s System x3650 M5 server with Intel Xeon processors, DSS-G is available as a pre-integrated, rack-level offering. It features Lenovo D1224 and D3284 12Gbps storage enclosures and drives, and software and networking components -- including Red Hat Enterprise Linux Support -- to maximize technology choice, the company claims.
A follow-up to the GPFS Storage Server (GSS), Lenovo said DSS-G adds these additional features:
- Scalability - Start small and grow performance capacity with a modular approach.
- RAID - Reduce rebuild overhead by eight times with IBM Spectrum Scale Declustered RAID.
- Network choice - Choose your preferred high-speed network, including Infiniband or Ethernet up to 100Gbps.
Lenovo said it will follow with additional SDS offerings for customers deploying Ceph or Luster.
DSS-G for Channel Partners
DSS-G’s scalability and lower price point likely makes it an easier sale for channel partners than GPFS. The ability to start small and grow performance over time makes it accessible to a larger number of customers.
Partners can also pitch DSS-G as a tool to reclaim valuable time and resources spent on designing, optimizing, installing and supporting their infrastructure, instead focusing on maximizing business value, the company says.
Lenovo spent the first part of this year readying partners for the major PC workstation, server and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) push that began April 1, the start of company’s fiscal year.
Channel Chief Sammy Kinlaw told us in February that he sees an opportunity to grab market share across all three sectors, and that he’s preparing to reward partners for some key behaviors in those markets.
