Lenovo has added a new family of VMware-based products to its ThinkAgile line of converged and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions.
The Morrisville’s N.C.-based vendor announced the new offerings in conjunction with VMware Inc.’s VMworld conference, which is currently underway in Las Vegas.
Called the ThinkAgile VX Series and due to reach market on November 17th, the systems unveiled today come with pre-integrated copies of Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware’s vSAN hyperconverged infrastructure platform, and can be administered through the same vCenter software that businesses use to manage their other VMware assets.
“VMware customers tend to veer toward vCenter as the single pane of glass,” observes Radhika Krishnan, vice president and general manager for software-defined infrastructure in Lenovo’s data center group.
There are three VX Series products in all. Models in the VX 3000 Series are general-purpose 1U and 2U solutions tailored to the needs of compute-heavy applications like virtual desktop infrastructure. VX 5000 Series products are 2U appliances optimized for use with email, analytics, and other workloads that require fast, high-capacity storage. The VX 7000 Series, finally, is designed to power database solutions, collaboration systems, and other especially performance-hungry applications.
“We are really looking to give our customers choices,” Krishnan says.
All three offerings feature a single ThinkServer compute node powered by the new Intel Scalable processors officially launched last month. They’re also equipped with hyperconverged infrastructure enhancements developed in-house by Lenovo itself, including network traffic visualization software that lets administrators see exactly which nodes and workloads are causing performance bottlenecks and built-in data encryption.
The new systems also come with pre-failure alerting functionality that notifies technicians about components headed for breakdown, live workload migration across nodes, and the ability to perform rolling upgrades of system software without taking applications offline. According to Krishnan, all three features reflect the importance of reliability in hyperconverged infrastructure platforms.
“When storage and compute come together in the same box, it’s like you’re putting multiple eggs in the same basket, so you really want to make sure your platform underneath is able to stay up and running at all times,” she says.
Like other products in the ThinkAgile portfolio, the new VX Series units are backed by Lenovo’s ThinkAgile Advantage support program, which offers deployment, configuration, and training assistance. Available for one- to five-year subscriptions, those services are bundled into the appliance’s final price tag.
Though Krishnan decline to provide specifics about pricing for VX Series products, she said entry-level configurations start at around $35,000.
Lenovo introduced the ThinkAgile line last October in connection with a larger push into the data center, and has been expanding it steadily ever since. Recent additions include the ThinkAgile SX series for Microsoft Azure Stack, which debuted in June, and the ThinkAgile SX for Nutanix platform.
“We want to give [customers] the capabilities that they care about and the ecosystem that they want to stay aligned with,” says Krishnan.
Also at VMworld today, VMware launched the hybrid cloud offering it jointly announced with Amazon Web Services last October. VMworld concludes on Wednesday.
