Lenovo Data Center Group Expands with ThinkAgile VX Series

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VMWARE VMWORLD — Lenovo on Monday announced the ThinkAgile VX Series, the latest additions to its ThinkAgile data-center product line.

The ThinkAgile VX Series, powered by VMware vSAN, is a set of new hyperconverged appliances geared toward the VMware ecosystem. The ThinkAgile portfolio of products focuses on Lenovo’s software-defined infrastructure solutions built on top of ThinkSystem (server) building blocks.

Lenovo’s Radhika Krishnan

“For customers who have already bought into the VMware value proposition, we’re bringing the core benefits of hyperconverged … simplicity, agility, ease of use, cost economics … and are making it more tangible and more real for VMware customers,” Radhika Krishnan, vice president and general manager, software-defined infrastructure with Lenovo’s data-center group, told us.

The ThinkAgile VX Series joins the ThinkAgile SX series for Microsoft Azure Stack, as well as the ThinkAgile SX rack-level solutions. This new ThinkAgile VX series positions Lenovo as Dell EMC’s only competitor.

Built on Lenovo ThinkSystem platforms and powered by Intel Xeon scalable family processors, the VX Series is a pre-integrated, pre-configured hyperconverged solution that reduces data center complexity by aggregating servers, storage and virtualization resources into a common resource pool within an industry-standard platform. The VX series was designed for easy, rapid deployment so customers can focus on building their businesses rather than building and maintaining infrastructure.

The VX Series is highly scalable so customers can start with as few as three nodes to grow storage and performance capacity without costly overprovisioning or disrupting day-to-day operations. It is equipped with the latest version of VMware vSAN, which includes up to seven times greater storage space with deduplication and compression capabilities, and new features such as native encryption, which eliminates the need for separate self-encrypting drives that increase total cost of ownership (TCO) for customers.

The ThinkAgile VX series consists of three models: the 3000, 5000 and 7000. All systems will be available in either all-flash or hybrid configurations, and be available starting Nov. 17, the company said.

• VX 3000 Series: General-purpose 1U and 2U 1-node solutions optimized for compute-heavy applications, such as VDI.
• VX 5000 Series: Storage-dense 2U 1-node solutions optimized for fast, high-capacity storage applications such as email, big data, and analytics.
• VX 7000 Series: 2U 1-node solutions optimized for the highest-performance workloads, such as databases and collaboration.

The Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series also is deployed with ThinkAgile Advantage, what Lenovo calls a “white glove” support service that offers customers deployment, configuration and training assistance to help increase time to value from days or weeks — to just hours. The service includes a direct line of communication to ThinkAgile support technicians for streamlined hardware and software troubleshooting. Technicians remain with customers as the single point of contact throughout the entire support process, the vendor said.

The partner opportunity?

According to Krishnan, the new hyperconverged appliances will be sold both directly and through Lenovo data-center partners.

“We’re doubling down on our partner ecosystem trying to make it a lot easier for them to transact product and we know for a fact that our DCG partners are excited to sell our software-defined offerings,” Krishnan told us, adding that now is a good time for partners to monetize services.

Lenovo also is making collateral materials available to partners, i.e. play cards, cookbooks, solution architectures, etc.