Lenovo has introduced the Lenovo ThinkSystem SR635 and SR655 server platforms, two of the industry’s most powerful single-socket servers.
As businesses are tasked with doing more with less, the new Lenovo solutions provide the performance of a dual-socket server at the cost of a single-socket.
These new additions to Lenovo’s expansive server portfolio are powered by next-generation AMD EPYC 7002 Series processors and were designed specifically to handle customers’ evolving, data-intensive workloads such as video security, software-defined storage and network intelligence, as well as support for virtualised and edge environments.
The result is a solution that packs power along with efficiency for customers who place a premium on balancing throughput and security with easy scalability.
“Lenovo’s endless pursuit of innovations to accelerate our customers’ intelligent transformation has been paramount in our rise to become one of the fastest growing data center OEMs in the world,” says Doug Fisher, chief operating officer and senior vice-president: business units at Lenovo Data Center Group. “Today Lenovo is expanding our AMD relationship with new, fully optimised solutions to help our joint customers address complex and data-intensive workloads, enabling them to do more with less while still providing uncompromised end-to-end security.”
The technological breakthroughs and increased capabilities of the new platforms are in line with recent governmental commitment to further implement fourth industrial revolution (4IR) technology across industry verticals. As South Africa continues to implement new, data- and processing- intensive technology, it is more necessary than ever that the backbone behind it be tailored for growing workloads.
Organisations are juggling business priorities with tight budgets. Lenovo’s new ThinkSystem SR635 and SR655 server platforms not only allow customers to run more workloads on fewer servers, but also offer up to 73 percent savings on potential software licensing1, empowering users to accelerate emerging workloads more efficiently.
Additionally, customers can realise a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 46 percent2. Further supporting these advances in workload efficiency and TCO savings are the ThinkSystem SR635 and SR655 servers’ 16 world records, including two for energy efficiency3. The net result of all these enhancements is better price for performance.
The Lenovo ThinkSystem SR635 and SR655 provide more throughput, lower latency and higher core density, as well as the largest NVMe drive capacity of any single-socket on the market. Beyond that, the new 2nd Gen AMD EPYCTM processor based systems also provide a solid opportunity for the enablement of additional hyperconverged infrastructure solutions. This gives Lenovo the ability to offer customers SAN and other certified nodes and future ThinkAgile software-defined appliances for simple deployment, management, and scalability.
A new forecast from IDC estimates there will be 41,6-billion connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices, generating 79.4 zettabytes of data by 20254. Much of the growth will be driven by IoT and video security technology. Lenovo’s new solutions are especially ideal for use cases where more computing power is needed in confined spaces, using less energy; an example of this is video security for public safety in smart city, campus and mass transit environments.
Governments and other public safety organisations are tasked with monitoring these environments, swiftly and accurately identifying potential threats and responding quickly. The Lenovo ThinkSystem SR655 coupled with Pivot3’s software provides an edge computing video security solution capable of supporting up to 33 percent more video cameras per node5 than similar solutions.
With the increased bandwidth of PCIe 4.0, supported by the 2nd Gen AMD EPYCTM processors, customers get faster data transfer from the edge to the core and greater storage capacity permitting quicker recall of video for recognition and analysis.
The ultra-dense NVMe configurations of these new Lenovo solutions with AMD processors allow users to store and access huge amounts of data. Supporting up to six single-width or three double-width graphics processing units (GPUs), these new systems provide the ability to process and analyse high-definition video much quicker and more efficiently.
The GPUs coupled with the new AMD processor deliver faster video ingest rates, enhanced video analysis and improved machine learning, helping governments and other organisations better protect the people they serve.
“The combination of Lenovo’s quality and resilience and the breakthrough performance of the 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor deliver what our customers need to support their mission critical deployments,” says Bruce Milne, Pivot3 vice-president, chief marketing officer and GM. “As Pivot3 customers expand their use of intelligent infrastructure for safe airport, campus, hospitality and transportation use cases, security, resilience and management simplicity at scale are critically important. AMD and Lenovo allow us to deliver all of that and to delight our customers.”
In virtualised environments, organisations often have to decide between maximum performance and security. The hardware-assisted VM and memory encryption security features of the AMD EPYC 7002 Series processors combined with Lenovo ThinkShield solutions solve for this dilemma utilising an extra layer of security for virtualisation that isolates and minimises threats in the data center.
In addition, because the VM encryption resides in the hardware as opposed to the software or hypervisor, they do so without compromising on system performance.
Security is also of the utmost importance in video analysis and public safety scenarios. New features like a physical intrusion switch can detect and prevent tampering, allowing organisations to confidently run their security systems on Lenovo’s secure platforms. With up to 64 cores per socket and increased performance, these new Lenovo solutions allow organisations to host more virtual machines per server, providing greater distributed computing capability and improved workload efficiency.