Lenovo at the VMworld 2017 conference today announced it will make available a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) appliance based on the stack of vSAN storage software developed by VMware.
Radhika Krishnan, general manager for converged/hyperconverged infrastructure and networking for Lenovo, says the ThinkAgile VX Series is a set of pre-integrated 2u appliances to unify compute and storage aimed at organizations that have standardized in VMware. Lenovo already offers an HCI appliance based on a stack of software developed by Nutanix.
“We’re trying to make managing IT mindlessly simpler,” says Krishnan.
While HCI appliances are the fastest growing segment of enterprise IT, Krishnan says IT organizations are looking to partner with IT vendors capable of providing a broad mix of pre-integrated appliances and rack systems as well as continuing to provide servers and storage systems that internal IT organizations can configure on their own.
Krishan says Lenovo is differentiating itself compared to rivals by also focusing on improving networking involving HCI and converged platforms via the development of network switches for the data center.
Obviously, Lenovo is not the only provider of IT infrastructure with similar ambitions. The issue now is not so much where IT organizations are going to embrace pre-integrated systems, but rather figuring out what stack of software to actually deploy on them.
