Lenovo's latest heavy on flash, security for enterprise storage

Flash aids data centers

There are several key takeaways. First, Lenovo is trying to simplify and modernize its offerings, especially by integrating QLC flash. The data center is not going away; in fact, it is often an area of focused modernization efforts. According to research by TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group, 92% of organizations expect to maintain or increase their current rate of data center infrastructure spending in 2023.

With the introduction of Lenovo ThinkSystem DG enterprise storage arrays, the benefits of flash technology become more accessible to a wider variety of organizations and workloads. Beyond low-latency performance, flash technology helps to deliver more predictable performance, improve reliability and improve energy efficiency. As more executive leaders prioritize sustainability and energy efficiency, products such as the ThinkSystem DG will continue to become more attractive.

All these benefits help to improve the overall total cost of ownership and return on investment of an all-flash environment because organizations can simplify the design of their overall data center storage footprint. According to Lenovo, the ThinkSystem DG systems offer up to six times faster performance at up to 50% less cost than hard drive-based arrays. Lenovo also calls out advantages in its architectural design to specifically handle large data set workloads and read-intensive enterprise AI workloads.

While organizations will want to evaluate any new storage investment in their specific environment, predictable, low-latency storage performance delivers notable benefits to AI workloads. It also helps to speed up data access and movement across the data pipeline.

Ransomware protection is key

Similarly, the ThinkSystem DM3010H unified scale-out hybrid storage product should deliver a significant performance improvement over the previous generation. It delivers benefits to the ThinkSystem Unified Complete software, most notably through the integration of ransomware protection and hybrid cloud support.

As vendors start adding more capabilities into their systems, such as immutable snapshots, to help better protect against ransomware, comprehensive protection will become more accessible and realistic.

On that note, the ThinkSystem Unified Complete software, available on all ThinkSystem DG arrays and new ThinkSystem DM arrays, adds to Lenovo's list of enterprise data services and protection features with the inclusion of that ransomware protection capability. It also offers the ability to take immutable snapshots and includes new hybrid cloud data management features.

The inclusion of immutable snapshots has quickly emerged as a table-stakes feature for enterprise and even midrange storage. The pervasiveness of ransomware makes increased protection and cyber resilience a must-have feature for any storage system. Ultimately, there is no single technology or single vendor that can deliver full protection from ransomware. But as vendors start adding more capabilities into their systems, such as immutable snapshots, to help better protect against ransomware, comprehensive protection will become more accessible and realistic.

For the hybrid cloud, ThinkSystem Unified Complete software adds S3 asynchronous replication and the ability to snapshot copies to the cloud. Both features help to simplify the effective integration of public cloud services into on-premises IT environments. As more organizations expand into the public cloud, increased simplification is essential.

In addition, ThinkSystem Unified Complete software is all-inclusive regarding its features, so Lenovo is helping to further simplify design and architectural processes. At the same time, it makes more advanced functionality, such as ransomware protection, more accessible.

Ultimately, as Lenovo builds out its ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile portfolios, it continues to establish itself as an enterprise infrastructure vendor that organizations should consider. With businesses engaging in a constant struggle to scale to meet demands while trying to control costs, complexity and energy consumption, they need continued innovation in the data center and hybrid cloud.

Enterprise Strategy Group is a division of TechTarget. Its analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.