Lenovo has long provided a variety of fully integrated solution stacks to help organizations quickly deploy leading infrastructure offerings from partners like Microsoft, SAP, and VMware. Fundamental to any converged architecture, however, is networking. To help ensure customer success with class-leading networking, Lenovo penned a deal with NVIDIA in July of this year to provide NVIDIA Mellanox Spectrum Ethernet switches and NVIDIA Cumulus Linux in their integrated solutions. Lenovo has announced the first products in its updated integrated solutions portfolio. This portfolio is highlighted by the ThinkAgile SX for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub, a turnkey solution engineered by Lenovo, Microsoft, and NVIDIA.
Lenovo has long provided a variety of fully integrated solution stacks to help organizations quickly deploy leading infrastructure offerings from partners like Microsoft, SAP, and VMware. Fundamental to any converged architecture, however, is networking. To help ensure customer success with class-leading networking, Lenovo penned a deal with NVIDIA in July of this year to provide NVIDIA Mellanox Spectrum Ethernet switches and NVIDIA Cumulus Linux in their integrated solutions. Lenovo has announced the first products in its updated integrated solutions portfolio. This portfolio is highlighted by the ThinkAgile SX for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub, a turnkey solution engineered by Lenovo, Microsoft, and NVIDIA.
The way we are consuming technology is rapidly shifting, and how things are done today is not like years ago, or even yesterday for that matter. IT organizations need to be able to quickly shift and adapt to the convergence of user experience, business needs, and customer success. Look at how we personally consume technology–any of us can edit documents, hold an online video call, order rideshare, or rent data storage in the cloud in a few seconds, all without needing to build any of the infrastructure. Our expectations from personal use translate directly into our work. No longer are we constrained by legacy technology. Organizations demand the same ease and flexibility when consuming IT services, especially when it comes to hybrid cloud.
The cloud promises ease of use, scalability, and most importantly, better user experience while consuming complex technology. In other words, the cloud promises to get customers what they need when and how they need it.
Businesses of all sizes are facing this challenge today. To cloud or not to cloud? This really isn’t a question of if, but more of when. Cloud has changed the way end users and businesses consume technology, setting the bar high on speed and agility when developing or initializing a change. Why would users want to go through a lengthy provisioning cycle for a virtual machine or database? They can have it running in a matter of no time by logging into their cloud account. Organizations need to deliver this experience from within the controls of internal IT departments, maintaining fiscal and compliance control.
Lenovo ThinkAgile Integrated Systems
Lenovo’s Software Defined Infrastructure offers a wide array of options within the Lenovo ThinkAgile Integrated Systems and Appliances. In fact, Lenovo brings a powerful solution set to combat the data complexity that organizations are facing today. Whether you are starting with a traditional SDDC/HCI approach or bringing the cloud to your own data center, Lenovo has developed cutting-edge solutions with the ThinkAgile series, making your digital transformation seamless and flexible. Reducing the time to market for your IT projects frees up resources to focus on your core business.
Lenovo has made strategic alliances to deliver world-class solutions tailored to solve your business challenges. Like the industry, Lenovo has come a long way from the eleven founding members 30-plus years ago. Lenovo had the insight to build lasting partnerships with Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Intel, enabling them to provide best-in-class solutions for their customers.
Lenovo ThinkAgile appliances deliver flexible infrastructure, depending on the path you are taking. Whether it be with a converged system, cloud, or a hybrid approach, Lenovo has geared a fully-featured solution in the Lenovo ThinkAgile series. ThinkAgile solutions simplify IT infrastructure and accelerate time to value, freeing you to focus on your core business.
Microsoft is at the forefront of cloud innovation and growth, striving to provide the best solution to meet users’ expectations. With over 250 services, Microsoft Azure is poised to help organizations combat challenges from AI to Blockchain to Security and Compute, to whatever the future holds.
As organizations race to digitally transform, many are finding they can move faster by using public cloud services to build on modern architectures and refresh legacy apps. Many workloads, however, must remain on-premises. For example, due to technological and regulatory obstacles, Microsoft provides broad hybrid-cloud options and cloud innovation for all your workloads, wherever they reside. Part of the Azure portfolio, Azure Stack Hub, broadens the Azure solution to let you run apps in an on-premises environment and deliver Azure services in your datacenter.
Lenovo ThinkAgile SX for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub integrates computing, storage, networking, and management. It is designed with industry-standard building blocks, including hyperconverged nodes that are built on powerful and highly reliable Lenovo ThinkSystem servers, NVIDIA Mellanox networking, and Azure Stack Hub software that extends Azure technologies on-premises.
NVIDIA and Mellanox have been long-time collaborators with Lenovo, and now this relationship has expanded in a big way. Lenovo will begin providing NVIDIA Mellanox Spectrum Ethernet switches to its customers in selected integrated solutions, joining the NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand switches already offered by the company.
Modern applications require performance that can’t be met with legacy network infrastructure. Lenovo ThinkAgile SX is configured with NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX® adapters. This allows for the offloading of CPU cycles by utilizing the NVIDIA RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) enabled ethernet adapters to provide the highest performance.
Benefits of Lenovo ThinkAgile SX
The ThinkAgile SX for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub ships fully integrated into a rack cabinet. It has been tested and configured and is ready to be plugged in and turned on. In fact, it has been designed to effortlessly integrate into existing infrastructure, accelerating time to value, and reducing infrastructure maintenance costs.
There is also no up-front cloud software license acquisition cost for the ThinkAgile SX for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub, as monthly billing is based on actual resource usage (capacity-based licenses are also available).
Lenovo provides ThinkAgile Advantage Single Point of Support for the entire ThinkAgile solution including compute nodes, networking, and software, enabling quicker problem resolution and minimized downtime.
ThinkAgile SX for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub offers the following key features and benefits:
- Lenovo ThinkAgile SX is designed to optimize workload performance and provide IT agility for business demands by offering deployment scalability whether on-premise, hybrid, or in the cloud.
- Flexible monthly billing that is based on actual resource usage, helping lower acquisition costs for the entire solution by eliminating upfront cloud software licensing fees.
- Factory-integrated, pre-configured ready-to-go solutions that are delivered in a Lenovo rack cabinet or which can be installed in a customer-provided rack cabinet, with all the hardware customers need for their workloads: servers, storage, and network switches, plus Azure Stack Hub cloud software and Lenovo XClarity hardware management tools.
- Lenovo deployment services that are included with the solution help get customers up and running quickly.
- Proven and reliable Lenovo ThinkSystem servers featuring the first and second generation of the Intel Xeon Scalable Processor Family provide compute power for a variety of workloads and applications.
- NVIDIA Mellanox SN2410 Ethernet Switches that deliver exceptional performance and low latency, along with cost savings.
- NVIDIA Cumulus Linux is a revolutionary NOS that extends the Linux user experience beyond servers all the way to switches and provides rich routing functionality for large-scale applications.
- RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) support, using NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX adapters, offloads I/O cycles, which allows the transfers of large amounts of data with little CPU intervention.
- Microsoft Azure Stack Hub provides a scalable, highly available solution for hybrid cloud extension to deliver Microsoft Azure cloud services on-premises with integrated compute, networking, storage, security, and management services that manage VM lifecycle and automate and orchestrate workload provisioning.
- Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), an integrated part of the Azure Stack Hub solution, delivers scalable, highly available distributed shared storage that provides extensive data protection and recovery with no performance bottlenecks and no single point of failure.
Lenovo ThinkAgile Advantage provides a single point of contact, allowing for quicker problem determination and minimized downtime. Lenovo provides support for all issues that customers might encounter with the server, networking, storage, and software used in the solution.
Final Thoughts
Lenovo ThinkAgile SX Series is a powerful, easy-to-use solution for hyperconverged infrastructure. ThinkAgile SX Series solutions ship in approximately three weeks with all hardware factory-configured, pretested, pre-installed in a rack, and ready to go. With Lenovo’s professional services to set up, configure, and install all the software, you can be ready in hours instead of days or weeks.
The ThinkAgile SX Series solution seamlessly integrates market-leading software with unparalleled infrastructure management from Lenovo to dramatically reduce time-to-value and TCO. And because Lenovo supports all parts of the solution, you don’t have to run back and forth between vendors because of interoperability and compatibility problems. The ThinkAgile SX SKUs are available to order now through Lenovo.
Lenovo ThinkAgile SX for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub
