Lenovo's vision for the data center of the future

EUR 50 billion of turnover, number 1 on the PC market worldwide. This is the business card that Lenovo opened in Accelerate 19 to the Transform 3.0 conference. The event is dedicated to the Data Center Group's products and services, the division that deals with servers, supercomputers, storage, and all the technologies that enable companies to digitally transform. Intelligent Transformation is Lenovo's term for describing the radical change taking place in the technology world, with the vision of making new technological solutions available to companies of any size.

Lenovo Transform 3.0: Cloud and Edge Transform focus is an annual event that has just arrived at the third edition, during which Lenovo's Data Center Group presents the results achieved in the previous year and outlines the future strategy. Nearly five years have passed since Lenovo acquired the server division of IBM in October 2014 and the growth in the data center sector seems unstoppable after an initial period of adjustment. Much of the credit goes to Kirk Skaugen, Lenovo's Executive Vice President and Data Center Group President (DCG), who joined Lenovo after a long career with Intel in 2016. Transform is his creation and one perceived the pride with which, for four consecutive quarters, he declared on stage that DCG has grown 1.7 times the market. Today, with x86 architecture, Lenovo excels in server performance, is a reliability leader and has taken the top position in the supercomputer market.

Transform was born in 2017, with the launch in Lenovo's line-up of the widest range of servers and the creation of ThinkAgile and ThinkSystem brands. With the announcement of the partnership with NetApp, which has become a real joint venture for the Chinese market, the focus in the 2018 edition was on storage solutions. This year, Transform 3.0 has focused on Cloud and Edge, closing the circle of an increasingly focused strategy to deliver solutions where products and services merge to deliver tangible benefits to businesses in their digital transformation.

The products behind the new solutions Lenovo renewed the entire range of x86 servers, integrating new Intel Xeon processors that exploit persistent memories from Intel Optane DC and launched a new line of edge servers with the ThinkSystem SE 350 series during the Mobile World Congress. An opportunity for Lenovo to reiterate how the cloud evolution necessarily goes through edge computing was to accelerate 19. The forecasts of analysts speak of 20 billion IoT devices active by 2020 and it is already evident today that the model in which each device connects directly to the "central" cloud to send peripherally detected data is no longer sustainable. Therefore, moving the processing capacity needed to act directly on the collected data, sending selected and already processed data to the cloud for further analysis becomes essential. Working in the edge means dealing with entirely different working conditions compared to working in a data center. It simply means installing servers under unprotected conditions, with uncontrolled temperatures and atmospheric agents such as dust and humidity that do not allow the use of traditional servers. Therefore, an edge server such as the ThinkSystem SE 350 is first of all more compact than a normal server rack, then designed to operate under very variable conditions and has a series of measures to ensure its safety in uncontrolled environments. In order to detect movement or infringement attempts, sensors are then integrated into the server edge with a system that automatically destroys data once the sensors are activated. The Lenovo edge servers integrate "useless" technologies for a server designed for the data center and hence antennas for WiFi connection in terms of connectivity.

Lenovo also presented its strategy in the field of IoT, based on providing the market with a complete solution. Not only a wide range of products, but also a series of solutions called ThinkIoT, compatible with all products on the market, enabling efficient IoT applications to be realized, ensuring the highest level of safety.

The latest ThinkPad products also found space during Accelerate 19, increasingly complementing data center infrastructures and the cloud. The ThinkPad Nano and Nano IoT, which are interesting in Edge and IoT, are mini PCs that can be installed anywhere and easily interfaced with other IoT systems or sensors. The new ThinkPad X1 Extreme has been shown and the new ThinkBook product line has been launched, designed to meet the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises and thus very suitable for the Italian reality. Of course, the event's undisputed star was the presentation of the folding PC prototype, which could potentially create a new product category.

We had the opportunity to interview David Rabin, Global Commercial Marketing Vice President at Lenovo, on the vision of the company for the future of PCs and IoT devices. There are two major trends for David. On the one hand, the integration of mechanisms of artificial intelligence into each device. An example is the possibility of a product such as the ThinkSmart Hub, a meeting room videoconference system that will integrate telemetry systems and intelligence to process the received data in the future. Therefore, it will be possible to see whether the meeting rooms are being used effectively or to adjust the conditioning system according to the room's actual use. More generally, each device, including PCs, will become a pointof environment data collection that surrounds it and will be able to process the data locally and send the most relevant information to the cloud for further processing in a manner consistent with the computing scenario described above. The second, very interesting trend is the possibility of smartphone-like PCs becoming more and more similar in the way they are used. The integration of wide-range microphones, the evolution of the standby state, with the PC that will not shut down completely but will continue to keep some elements active, the increase of battery autonomy, to really have a whole day's work and the increasing integration of virtual assistants, will allow you to interact with the PC in a new way.

An innovative augmented reality viewer called Lenovo ThinkReality A6, designed for industrial applications and also part of a platform to create turnkey solutions for customers, was to close the circle of devices presented at Transform 3.0.

Lenovo TruScale, the program "server as a service" Closing the topic circle covered throughout Accelerate 19is TruScale, Lenovo's program for providing server, storage and data center solutions in Infrastructure as a Service mode. The innovative element of the Lenovo solution is based on the amount of electricity absorbed by the consumer pricing model. This model, which is based on the definition with the customer of an initial sizing of the infrastructure, allows resources to be paid only when used. Talking with EMEA Lenovo Chairman Graham Marr, it emerged how TruScale can become a solution to support a trend highlighted in corporate infrastructure management strategies. Many companies, particularly large ones, are gradually bringing multiple resources into the cloud on the premise. There are several reasons for this trend, ranging from legal issues related to data management, to the need to achieve higher performance and also to include costs in some cases. It may seem paradoxical, but if the consumption-paid cloud resources are saturated, also depending on the decline in hardware prices, it may be convenient to bring some resources back to the corporate data centers. Depending on the fact that the present and future of the Data Center Group division appears to be heading in the right direction in implementing this transition, with great attention being paid to creating solutions that enable companies to transform digitally.