VMworld: Lenovo Unveils ThinkAgile VX Series Preconfigured Hyperconverged Infrastructure Solutions

At VMworld 2017, Lenovo Enterprise Solutions, Pte Ltd announced the ThinkAgile VX Series, powered by VMware, Inc.‘ vSAN, a preconfigured hyperconverged infrastructure solution engineered to provide businesses of all sizes with simplified management and efficiency.

ThinkAgile VX Series models

The VX series is the latest addition to the company’s ThinkAgile portfolio of integrated appliances and systems designed to support customers as they modernize their IT infrastructures and unlock the efficiency, cost economics and agility of a software-defined data center.

“Today’s datacenter market is being disrupted by the increasing demands on IT departments to rapidly deliver new services and applications. They are looking for new ways to resolve these challenges while growing their business,” said Radhika Krishnan, VP and GM, software-defined infrastructure, data center group, Lenovo. “The ThinkAgile VX series is a new hyperconverged platform from Lenovo and VMware that provides public cloud-like simplicity, in a private or hybrid cloud environment. This solution is built on Lenovo’s ThinkSystem foundation of highly reliable ⁽¹⁾, high performing servers, and is tightly integrated with VMware vSAN’s industry-leading hyperconverged capabilities. In keeping with Lenovo’s ranking as number one in customer satisfaction ⁽²⁾, the ThinkAgile Advantage single point-of-support and white glove service experience is included with no extra cost.“

Built on the company’s ThinkSystem platforms and powered by Xeon Scalable family processors, the VX Series is a pre-integrated, pre-configured hyperconverged solution that reduces data center complexity by aggregating servers, storage and virtualization resources into a common resource pool within an industry-standard platform. The VX series was designed for rapid deployment so customers can focus on building their business rather than building and maintaining infrastructure. It is scalable so customers can start with as few as three nodes to grow storage and performance capacity without costly over provisioning or disrupting day-to-day operations. It is equipped with the latest version of vSAN, which includes up to seven times greater storage space with deduplication and compression capabilities, and new features such as native encryption, which eliminates the need for separate self-encrypting drives that increase TCO for customers.

“Hyperconvergence has greatly improved our data center operations in terms of cost efficiency, data protection, scalability, and data efficiency. We deployed Lenovo’s VMware vSAN ReadyNodes and now our environment is easy to manage and less complex. We look forward to further enhancing our environment with integrated, turnkey hyperconverged appliances that will provide effortless and speedy deployment. Lenovo ThinkAgile VX series is a logical next step in the evolution of our infrastructure and our business,” said Marcus Hill, CEO, Litewire LLC.

The company is certified to offer VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) ReadyNodes, which brings together vSphere, vSAN, and NSX virtualization into a natively integrated stack that can be deployed on-premises or run as-a-service from the public cloud. The firm’s VCF ReadyNodes are also built on a ThinkSystem infrastructure that currently holds 42 performance benchmarks.

“Hyperconvergence has quickly become the architecture of choice for modern infrastructure. VMware vSAN continues to help drive transformative change that increases efficiency, flexibility, and performance,” said Yanbing Li, SVP and GM, storage and availability, VMware. “Our customers put high importance on simplicity and speed. That is why we are very excited about the announcement of the Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series. This turnkey appliance provides our joint clients with a highly reliable infrastructure that saves time and improves performance while making their IT organization more agile.“

ThinkAgile VX Series platform can be used as infrastructure for ROBO and retail stores as well as VDI deployments and enterprise applications. To meet the variety of workload requirements and customer specifications, tit is available in three models and offers configure-to-order flexibility to meet customer requirement.

All systems are available in either all-flash or hybrid configurations:

• VX 3000 Series: General-purpose 1U and 2U one-node solutions optimized for compute-heavy applications, such as VDI.

• VX 5000 Series: Storage-dense 2U one-node solutions optimized for fast, high-capacity storage applications such as email, big data, and analytics.

• VX 7000 Series: 2U one-node solutions optimized for the highest-performance workloads, such as databases and collaboration.

VX 3000 Series specifications
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VX 5000 Series specifications
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The ThinkAgile VX Series is also deployed with ThinkAgile Advantage, a firm’s support service that offers ThinkAgile customers deployment, configuration and training assistance to dramatically increase time to value – from days or weeks, to just hours. Customers are also provided with a direct line of communication to ThinkAgile support technicians for streamlined hardware and software troubleshooting. Technicians remain with customers as the single-point-of contact throughout the entire support process.

“Today’s announcement is a significant signal to Lenovo and VMware clients looking to adopt hyperconverged infrastructure with the latest hardware and software technologies from these two market leaders,” said Lee Caswell, VP, products, storage and availability, VMware. “The Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series provides our joint customers a turnkey integrated system with integrated support that combines the latest VMware vSAN software with the latest Intel Xeon Scalable processors. This is an important new offering that builds on the success Lenovo has already achieved by offering certified vSAN ReadyNodes for system builders. Together, VMware and Lenovo provide an enterprise-ready platform that our joint customers can trust.“

The ThinkAgile VX Series for VMware vSAN will be available starting November 17, 2017.

⁽¹⁾ 2016-2017 Global Hardware, Server OS Reliability Report, ITIC; October 2016.
⁽²⁾ 1H2017 Corporate IT Buying Behavior and Customer Satisfaction Study, TBR; June 2017.