Lenovo storage users stand to benefit from the hardware vendor’s close alliance with Veeam that assures them of a seamless cloud-based data management and backup experience.
Ketan Jeevan
Ketan Jeevan, brand manager: Lenovo at First Distribution, explains that the two companies have forged a close partnership that ease’s organisations’ journey to the cloud, helping them to manage, backup and protect their most critical asset – their data.
Now, customers can buy Veeam Cloud Data Management solutions together with Lenovo Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) and Storage Area Network (SAN) offerings from Lenovo and its resellers, in a single transaction.
Jeevan points out that Lenovo’s industry-leading storage solutions were designed around the Veeam Availability Platform to address customers’ need for always-on availability, combined with fast and effective cloud-based backup.
Veeam’s integration with Lenovo solutions provides organisations with a broad range of choice and flexibility to deliver availability, IT simplicity, scalable performance, operational efficiency and accelerated innovation for the Hyper-Available Enterprise, he says.
Winston Spagnoletti, brand manager: Veeam at First Distribution, adds that Veeam, together with the best-in-class data centre infrastructure and software-defined solutions from Lenovo, helps businesses accelerate their digital transformation journeys by simplifying IT, reducing risk, lowering costs and enhancing business agility.
Winston Spagnoletti
The close alliance means that reseller partners can offer customers a complete data management and backup solution that they know is tested and validated so it will work out-of-the-box.
“Lenovo’s global reach and extensive partner ecosystem, combined with the strong growth of its Data Centre Infrastructure (DCI) and SDI business units, provides Veeam customers with the best purchasing experience,” Jeevan says.
“The integrated systems help customers to eliminate the costs and complexity of legacy infrastructure, virtualisation and data protection management. They can also achieve better return on investment (ROI) through faster application development and deployment, improved data analytics, and simplified disaster recovery.”
Lenovo’s hybrid IT data centre solutions, including servers, storage, networking, and hyperconverged infrastructure, are a perfect fit for the Veeam Availability Platform, says Spagnaoletti. The joint solution offers integrated back-up, restore and replication functions.
He points out that Veeam is the industry leader in backup solutions that offer Cloud Data Management.
Jeevan explains that customers gain a cost advantage as well when they deploy a combined Veeam and Lenovo storage and server infrastructure, on top of the enhanced performance, increased business agility and the ability to manage data in a multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environment.
Customers are able to back up ThinkSystem DM series as well as ThinkSystem DE series storage along with Lenovo ThinkAgile HX and VX hyperconverged infrastructures, powered by Nutanix and VMware respectively.
“Together, Lenovo and Veeam help organisations to accelerate innovation through intelligent Cloud Data Management.”
First Distribution adds another level of confidence, with its high level of skills and resources available to partners.
“First Distribution is South Africa’s leading distributor for data centre, enterprise and cloud solutions,” says Jeevan. “We have distributed both the Lenovo and Veeam brands for many years.
“In fact, First Distribution has a long history of partnering with Lenovo Data Centre Group, going right back to the early days as IBM’s first distributor in South Africa, and has been named Lenovo Distributor of the year for few years running.
“Because we focus on only enterprise-level solutions, and have a strong partnering ethos, which positions us well in providing customers with the best-fit solution.”
Part of the distributor’s value-add is offering the right level of skill and brand knowledge on both product sets to guide resellers and enable them to table the best possible solution for their customers’ requirements, Jeevan points out.
“First Distribution has the unique ability to architect market-leading solutions for customers across a wide range of categories due to our skilled in-house resources.”
Spagnoletti agrees: “First Distribution offers a breadth of end-to-end, best-in-class data centre solutions that address traditional data centre and next-generation data centre workloads across hybrid cloud environments.”
First Distribution believes in an N+1 strategy and so most of the vendors it represents offer complementary solutions, he adds. “So we have the skills to design a Lenovo + Veeam solution to assist our partners with a proven and tested solution to go to market with.”
Partners benefit in other ways as well, Spagnoletti says. “Because the Lenovo + Veeam solution is a single configuration-to-order process, our partners can generate proposals faster and be more responsive to the needs of the customer. This, in turn, shortens the sales cycle and maximises their margins.”
In addition, partners are recognised by both Lenovo and Veeam for any solutions sales, so they benefit on both partner programmes.
When it comes to support, both Lenovo and Veeam are reliable companies, well known for their high levels of customer satisfaction, and offer global support contracts.
For further information contact Ketan Jeevan on Ketan.Jeevan@firstdistribution.com or Winston Spagnoletti on Winston.Spagnoletti@firstdistribution.com.