Lenovo’s ‘Largest Storage Portfolio Refresh’ Targets AI Readiness, Virtualization Costs

'A lot of customers in the SMB and midmarket, they don’t have the ability to move off of VMware really. They’re committed to that space, so helping them optimize is important,' Stuart McRae, Lenovo’s executive director and general manager of data storage, tells CRN.

Lenovo can save customers money on their virtualization deployments and get them ready for the AI era with the “largest storage portfolio refresh in company history,” Stuart McRae, Lenovo’s executive director and general manager of data storage, told CRN on Wednesday

“The opportunity is for enterprises to deploy AI to accelerate their innovation and to show a solid ROI for that investment in AI. The challenge at the same time is to address the burgeoning cost of their virtualization environment. There have been lots of changes so that is really driving the focus on our innovation,” McRae told CRN.

For customers embarking on an AI path, he said they need high-performance storage to make all of their data actionable. That means storage that is designed to deliver faster performance, robust security, and resiliency to power the inferencing, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agentic AI applications that organizations are hoping to deploy.

“I think for many, most enterprises, making their data AI-ready is the essential first step in their AI journey,” said McRae (pictured above).

Among the new announcements are the Lenovo ThinkAgile SDI V4 Series, a full-stack turnkey device that simplifies IT infrastructure and accelerated computing that enhances time to value for LLM workloads. The company also announced the Lenovo ThinkSystem Storage arrays, three times faster than previous models, while using less power and offering a 99 percent density improvement when upgrading from legacy products.

“That helps them in their licensing and their overall infrastructure costs,” McRae told CRN. “Those products are designed to be up and running in minutes to make it easy for the customer and the business partners.”

McRae said in many cases Lenovo customers are replacing storage systems that are at least five years old, so those environments reap instant and massive gains from switching to modern, flash architecture, including a 97 percent reduction in energy costs.

“Eighty percent of it is hard drive-based storage. If you want to modernize, to improve your virtualization, to be ready for AI you really need to move to flash and that’s a big transformation for customers,” he said. “When you consolidate you also have lower operating costs. You have fewer things to manage. Your service costs can be lower, because instead of deploying many boxes of storage, I’ve got it in this one case.”

McRae said it’s particularly advantageous for small and mid-sized customers who can integrate all of their block, file and object storage onto one platform that comes with AI-driven ransomware protection.

“They don’t need multiple platforms,” McRae said. “They can consolidate now all on one resilient flash solution.”

The ThinkAgile V4 HX Series GPT-in-a-Box features the industry's first liquid-cooled hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) appliance that is capable of inferencing large language models (LLMs) with a 25 percent energy savings over previous generations. The full-stack generative AI product is part of Lenovo’s partnership with Nutanix to deliver Nvidia NIMs and Hugging Face LLMs inside inferencing-capable hardware that can be deployed locally as a turnkey solution.

“That creates a ready to run, pre-configured solution for running AI in a hyperconverged environment. You get all the ease of management and ease of use that HCI platforms are known for,” he told CRN. “Some people talk about disaggregation. I think it’s more helpful for customers to converge those solutions.”

For customers who are using VMware’s bundled solutions, there are data usage costs that come with using vSan that customers would like to avoid. He said combining the HCI approach with appliance-based flash storage is a workaround that can save customers money.

“Being able to offload your data to a high-capacity flash platform that’s integrated into vCenter — so you still get the same great usability and management of your data, but it can lower your licensing costs by 40 percent because we’re moving that data on a super-efficient integrated flash solution — I think that’s very exciting,” he said. “A lot of customers in the SMB and midmarket, they don’t have the ability to move off of VMware really. They’re committed to that space so helping them optimize is important.”

CRN has reached out to Broadcom for comment, but has not yet heard back.

McRae said Lenovo is eager to see resellers and systems integrators take advantage of its ThinkAgile V4 HX series with Nutanix and ThinkAgile MX series with Microsoft’s hypervisor to help customers save on virtualization costs.

Additionally, as part of the storage announcement Lenovo unveiled AI starter kits — packs of validated designs and reference architecture — designed for its reseller partners to quickly deliver an AI systems to their customers.

“We want our partners to do the consulting and to do the deployment and be that direct contact with the customer, but we want to help with ‘where to start?’” he said. “We've designed these starter kits that are reference architecture, so the partner knows 'OK, well, I’ve got 16 GPUs. I need this level of storage. I need these Nvidia switches, this SR675 server with L40.’ So, we give them that integration, the recipe, the list components, and how to put those together to simplify it for the partners.”