The News: Lenovo launched a new family of quad-level cell (QLC) all-flash storage systems and added to its hybrid storage, managed software with ransomware protection, and Microsoft Azure Stack-based products. Read the full release at the Lenovo website.

Lenovo Beefs Up Data Management with New Storage, Management Software

Analyst Take: Lenovo has become one of the leading server vendors since acquiring IBM’s server business in 2014. It also started selling storage at that time, but Lenovo’s strategy for storage and hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) has been to partner with leading players – NetApp in storage, and VMware, Nutanix, and Microsoft in HCI. Lenovo boasts of being the storage market leader in lower-end systems, and now hopes to make use of recent technologies from partners to find greater success with higher-end systems.

The new products include the following.

Lenovo ThinkSystem DG Enterprise Storage Arrays: the new line of all-flash arrays comes in two models – the ThinkSystem DG5000 (2U, 24 cores) and ThinkSystem DG7000 (4U, 40 cores). They use capacity-optimized QLC flash, which has a lower cost-per-TB than other types of flash. Lenovo is looking to entice customers to move off systems with hard disk drives, claiming QLC can provide up to 6x faster performance, and 50% less cost and 25% less energy than HDD systems. The DG is designed for read-intensive enterprise AI and large dataset workloads, and supports file, block, and object storage.

Lenovo ThinkSystem DM3010H Enterprise Storage Array: The DM3010H replaces the DM3000 as the low-end of the ThinkSystem DM family. The hybrid system includes HDD and SSD drives (up to 1,872 drives for NAS and 936 for SAN deployments.)

Unified Complete Software Suite: This is the management software for the DG and DM storage systems. Based on NetApp BlueXP, the unified management software has added ransomware and data protection features.

Lenovo ThinkAgile SXM4600 and SXM6600 Servers: These are additions to Lenovo’s integrated systems for Azure Stack Hub. The SXM4600 and 6600 support Azure Arc, enabling customers to manage multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments. The new SXM systems are built on the latest ThinkSystem V3 servers based on the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Lenovo claims up to an 183% increase in transactional database performance over the previous generation.

The DG series will start shipping July 30, and the other systems and Unified Complete Software will ship in September. All will be available through Lenovo TruScale as-a-service and TruScale Infinite Storage tech refresh programs.

The data management launches help Lenovo address new AI and analytics workloads, and manage data on-premises, in the cloud, and at the edge. However, I see the ransomware and data protection features as the most important part of the announcement. Lenovo Unified Complete software runs across all the Lenovo DM and DG systems. It looks for anomalies in files that would signify suspicious activity. It will then automatically take action, such as shutting down the part of the system where the compromised data is stored and alerting the administrator. Unified Complete Software also creates immutable snapshots that cannot be altered, giving companies a safe copy of that snapshot.

Our research shows what CISOs want most from their data management tools is faster detection of an attack. In a recent survey of CISOs we conducted, 71% of respondents said they wanted “faster/earlier detection of a cyber-attack.” That was by far the most common response. The second most asked for request was “faster identification of last known good recovery point” with 43%.

The new ransomware protection is part of the standard licensing for Lenovo Complete Software. Lenovo previously offered ransomware protection features as an add-on license.

Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.