Lenovo Data Center Group (DCG) showcases continued investments in its solutions supporting IoT and edge computing as part of its IoT growth plan over the next few years. Building on the momentum of its fifth consecutive quarter of profit growth, Lenovo DCG is building a portfolio that takes infrastructure to where the data is, whether that be in the traditional data center, in the cloud or increasingly, at the edge.
Today, around 10 percent of enterprise-generated data is created and processed outside a traditional centralized data center or cloud. By 2022,†Gartner†predicts this figure will reach 75 percent. This migration is driving increased concerns around data privacy, security and regulations coupled with challenges of latency, bandwidth, and downtime. Lenovo is addressing these challenges by creating a broad portfolio of†edge computing offerings†that address the different ways that customers want to deploy edge computing solutions for IoT use cases.
Lenovo unveils the ThinkSystem SE350, an edge server that is just slightly larger than a ThinkPad. This purpose-built server will come to market this summer and is half the width and significantly shorter than a traditional server, making it ideal for deployment in tight spaces. It can be mounted on a wall, stacked on a shelf or mounted in a rack. The ThinkSystem SE350 puts increased processing power, storage and network closer to where data is generated, allowing actions resulting from the analysis of that data to take place more quickly. Since these edge servers are typically deployed outside of secure data centers, they include technology that encrypts the data stored on the device if it is tampered with, only enabling authorized users to access it. In addition, the server will support both Wi-Fi and LTE connectivity.
“There is tremendous opportunity to help customers realize the power that edge computing can bring to their organizations,” said Kirk Skaugen, Executive Vice President, Lenovo, and President of Lenovo Data Center Group. “We’ve made significant focused investments in our IoT and Telco offerings over the past year with several strategic partners, enabling connectivity from edge to data center. We are committed to supporting industry open source initiatives, including the Open RAN, and Lenovo looks forward to co-chairing the Open RAN (O-RAN) Cloudification and Orchestration groups.”
For customers who want pre-integrated and validated IoT solutions for simplified deployment and accelerated digital transformation, Lenovo has partnered with the industry to bring expertise to support edge computing use cases:
- Lenovo teams up with Pivot3 to drive smart city capabilities.†Lenovo demonstrated its commitment to Video- and Security-based solutions powered by†Pivot3†with live demos and customer examples at MWC Barcelona. As governments and organizations adopt the next generation of edge computing to help protect people, increase efficiency and avoid loss, Lenovo and Pivot3 are working together to support mission-critical smart city and safe campus deployments across multiple sectors. In collaboration with SecureTech,†a leading integrator of video security solutions, Lenovo and Pivot3 helped a leading Middle East hospitality customer secure their sprawling hotel complex meeting their mission-critical requirements for resilience, security, and manageability. Together, they delivered a successful security solution, efficiently capturing and managing their security video data. The project reduces the risk of data loss and system failure and lowers cost of acquisition and ownership, while reducing their need for advanced technical skills.
- Lenovo reveals its Future-Ready Retail Store Infrastructure solution in partnership with Scale Computing, enabling retail customers to deploy mini data centers that offer enterprise-class IT infrastructure at the edge of their networks.†Ahold Delhaize, an international food retail group headquartered in Zaandam, Netherlands, operates supermarkets and e-commerce businesses across 6,700+ stores in 11 countries, serving over 50 million customers each week. Delhaize wanted to reduce time spent deploying and managing edge IT infrastructure and needed a solution that could host traditional and IoT applications on the same hardware. With the combined solution, Delhaize found the stability, support, cost savings, simplicity and optimized security needed to modernize its stores with IoT for optimizing freezing, heating and the customer experience.
- Lenovo is working closely with VMware on Project Dimension, which will dramatically simplify the delivery of infrastructure-as-a-service to on-premise locations including at the edge.†A pilot program is underway with several customers with the aim of providing a commercially available offering that will extend VMware Cloud to deliver†a†software-defined data-center†(SDDC)†in a hyper-converged appliance as-a-service†for enterprise customers.
- Lenovo partners with select visionary ISVs and CoSPs to validate unique use cases, enabling CoSPs to roll out new monetizable services.†Lenovo’s Communication Service Provider (CoSP) strategy is aligned with the new emerging areas like Multi-Access Edge computing (MEC) and C-RAN. Partnering with China Mobile, Intel, and Baicells, Lenovo demonstrates the first 5G O-RAN virtualized solution providing increased flexibility to CoSP.
- Focused on our customer experience and solving relevant use cases, Lenovo and Orange established a Joint Innovation Partnership focused on hardware composability using†Intel Rack Scale Design†(RSD).†The main focus area of the joint research is maximizing energy, performance and cost efficiencies by pooling†& abstracting hardware resources, such as FPGA, GPU, and SmartNICs in edge deployment environments.
