Lenovo has shipped a set of ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile products bearing the new data center processors and memory products released today by Intel.
The 15 servers and five converged infrastructure appliances include what Lenovo calls the industry’s first eight-socket server equipped with Intel Optane DC persistent memory.
According to Lenovo, the newly launched 2nd-Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors in those devices enable double-digit performance increases. Incorporating Intel Optane DC persistent memory, meanwhile, helps customers recover from planned or unplanned outages in four minutes versus 50, a 12.5x improvement, while processing significantly more data in in-memory databases.
“Customers today need IT solutions that are built to handle a diverse set of applications and engineered to accelerate workloads for improved business outcomes. Lenovo’s new ThinkSystem servers featuring Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory are revolutionizing how customers think about application use cases, particularly how they manage their large memory challenges and higher availability of their applications,” said Kamran Amini, vice president and general manager for data center infrastructure and software-defined solutions in Lenovo’s Data Center Group, in a press statement.
“These new Lenovo solutions with persistent memory allow for more data and virtual machines to be stored on a single platform, and for mission critical applications like SAP HANA, they deliver much faster recovery of the data from a planned or unplanned outage. This helps reduce a customer’s overall operating expenses and enables further resiliency within their IT environment.”
Lenovo has pre-engineered 2nd-Generation Intel Xeon Scalable solutions for workloads including SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, and Red Hat Open Shift Containers in the works. When those systems ship in coming months, the company says, they will be verified by Intel as Intel Select Solutions. Lenovo plans to introduce additional Intel Select Solutions later, including products for VMware vSAN, network function virtualization infrastructure, blockchain hyperledger fabric, and Microsoft’s Azure Stack hyperconverged infrastructure offering.
In conjunction with today’s product launches, Lenovo, Intel, and data processing vendor Kx published record-breaking benchmarks through STAC Research for financial services industry workloads.
“Over the past few months Lenovo, Intel and Kx have used Intel Optane technology to set several new STAC-M3 records for systems running kdb+ on a single server,” said Peter Lankford, founder and director of STAC. “Now, the baseline STAC-M3 results from Lenovo servers using Intel Optane DC persistent memory have set new records in 11 of 17 benchmarks for kdb+ systems using a 2-socket server and 9 of 17 benchmarks for kdb+ systems using a 4-socket server. In one specific example, the calculation of market statistics that used to take more than half a second on a 2-socket kdb+ system now takes less than 75 milliseconds on the new solution—a speed acceleration of more than 7x.”
STAC coordinates the STAC Benchmark Council, a collection of over 300 financial institutions and more than 50 vendor organizations.
Intel’s 2nd-Generation Xeon Scalable processors and Optane DC persistent memory are core elements of a product launch today aimed at capitalizing on burgeoning demand for cloud and other data center workloads, as well as growth in emerging markets such as the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and 5G networking.
