Paving the way for AI innovation with modern data storage solutions and services

Lenovo has announced an expansive series of new data storage, virtualisation solutions and data management services, designed to help customers modernise their IT and data infrastructure for powering enterprise applications and AI-ready capabilities.

These new offerings include new Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile data storage and virtualisation solutions, announced in tandem with data management services.

Designed to provide a modern foundation for enterprises and mid-size businesses achieving artificial intelligence innovations, this announcement combines complementary hardware, software and services offerings to help deploy, manage and unleash the true potential of enterprise data.

“Sixty-three percent of organisations either do not have or are unsure if they have the right data management practices for AI, according to a survey by Gartner,” says Marco Pozzoni, director of EMEA Storage Sales at Lenovo.

Customer unique data is the differentiation that will drive their competitive advantage and most accurate results; however, 80% of storage deployed in the last five years is on slower hard drive-based storage (according to reporting by the Industrial Development Corporation) which is not optimised for AI.

“At the same time, customers are challenged with new virtualisation and containerisation requirements that demand open solutions. Businesses must mitigate this risk by ensuring their enterprise data systems and practices are modernised for advanced use cases.

“Across EMEA [Europe, the Middle East and Africa], both enterprises and SMEs are under pressure to keep pace with the rapid acceleration of the AI era, and that requires modern, future-ready infrastructure. As workloads grow in complexity, a strong data management strategy becomes non-negotiable. Lenovo’s new data storage solutions provide the foundation organisations need to deploy AI with confidence, scale operations efficiently and unlock the full value of their data,” Pozzoni adds.

Flexibility and choice for virtualisation and data needs

Businesses today need the efficiency and cyber resiliency of their systems to run in parallel to performance, simplicity and scalability, with an option to deploy on-prem and hybrid so that the data can stay in place for compliance while AI workloads run where appropriate.

Lenovo has introduced new Lenovo ThinkSystem and Lenovo ThinkAgile Enterprise offerings optimised for AI, virtualisation and storage bottlenecks, including:

• Lenovo ThinkSystem DS Series Storage Arrays: All-flash and protected storage area network (SAN) block storage systems that are simple to deploy and manage for virtualised environments, improving performance and efficiency for virtualisation and data modernisation.
• Lenovo ThinkAgile FX Series: Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) that delivers an open architecture that supports seamless conversion between select HCI solutions without replacing hardware, delivering maximum investment protection and flexibility.
• Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Series for disaggregated storage for Microsoft Azure Local: As an HCI-integrated appliance provider with Microsoft, Lenovo is expanding support for disaggregated external fibre channel SAN to deliver greater enterprise storage support for virtualisation customers.
• Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Series with NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000: Integrated next-generation GPU support to power advanced AI performance capabilities for enterprise inferencing with Microsoft Azure Local.
• Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series for AI Lenovo’s HCI offering: Features Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI) software stack to enable customers running in virtualised and distributed containerised environments to deploy, run and scale AI models in minutes.

Complete lifecycle services optimised for advanced workloads including AI

To help customers fully realise the benefits of their new systems and prepare their data for AI, Lenovo is extending this momentum with a broad portfolio of hybrid cloud and data lifecycle services designed to modernise environments, strengthen reliability and support evolving storage and AI workload requirements.

This portfolio includes Lenovo Deployment Services for ThinkAgile and ThinkSystem that help organisations accelerate time to value through more efficient infrastructure rollout, alongside a range of storage services that can be consumed individually or through Lenovo’s flexible TruScale model to enhance performance, agility and innovation across the data storage lifecycle.

To guide long-term strategy, Lenovo’s Hybrid Cloud Advisory Services help customers align on-prem or hybrid environments with compliance, data protection and operational efficiency. Lenovo’s Migration Services help organisations optimise data and workloads by combining cloud flexibility with the dependability of existing infrastructure.

As part of Lenovo’s expanded Data Management Services portfolio, Lenovo Premier Enhanced Storage Support delivers a specialised, storage-focused experience for IT teams managing critical workloads. With direct access to Lenovo experts, customers benefit from proactive monitoring, performance optimisation and guided issue resolution – helping ensure systems run reliably, are better protected and maintain the resilience needed to support AI innovation and hybrid cloud growth.