The News: Lenovo announced new solutions designed to enable customers to better solve for data management needs. The new storage solutions aim to protect against threats to customers’ critical data and help support sustainability goals by more effectively powering today’s demanding data management and analytics needs. Read the Lenovo Press Release here.
Lenovo Reinforces Storage Market Momentum with Launch of New Storage Solutions
Analyst Take: Lenovo is prudently using the launch of its new storage solutions to provide a sales and marketing refresh of its entire storage portfolio and tout its overall market momentum. The key highlights of its new storage portfolio offerings include:
- D4390 High Density JBOD for Software Designed Storage developed to enable up 62% less power consumption as compared to previous generation 2 and up to 60% reduction in data center space.
- ThinkSystem DM Systems 9.12 Software Release with new automated ransomware protection, autonomous ransomware protection, and tamper-proof snapshots to prevent ransomware deletion.
- Hardened Zero Trust architecture that increases defense from insider threats, provides advanced multifactor authentication, and supports immutable, tamperproof logging.
- 33% storage efficiency improvement over previous generation with new four to one efficiency
I view the new solutions as validating Lenovo’s portfolio development strategy in touting an array of benefits to customers including delivering power efficiency increases and datacenter space savings that help meeting their sustainability goals. These benefits align with new ThinkSystem storage systems that can help safeguard critical data with advanced ransomware protection as well as lower CAPEX by storing more data with less storage.
I see Lenovo’s portfolio development focus on ransomware threats as fully warranted as ransomware attacks surged substantially in 2022. For instance, the Data Breach Investigation Report (DBIR) by Verizon indicates there was a 13% rise in ransomware attacks year-over-year from 2021. This rise is a greater increase than the previous five years combined. Alarmingly, these attacks directly affected both workflow and employees. Almost 40% of enterprises sharing they had to lay off employees after an attack, 35% experiencing C-level resignations, another 33% reporting they had to suspend operations temporarily (Fortinet Top 50 Ransomware Trends for 2023).
The Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Systems 9.12 support of new ransomware capabilities such as automated ransomware protection, as well as delivering Hardened Zero Trust architecture, provides increased peace of mind for Lenovo customers, immediately strengthening the overall Lenovo storage proposition. Lenovo also made clear these cybersecurity solutions also augment the existing cybersecurity implementations that their customers already use.
Of note, Lenovo TruScale Infrastructure as-a-Service grew more than 600% YoY year-to-date, attesting to the expanding popularity of using pay-as-you-go models in adopting data management solutions. As such, Lenovo is demonstrating that its portfolio consisting of enterprise storage arrays & infrastructure, Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), Software Defined Storage (SDS), TruScale Infinite Storage-as-a-service, and vertically focused workload solutions are fulfilling the vast array of evolving customer demands. From my view, Lenovo’s new portfolio moves can generate more competitive disruption across the enterprise storage competitive landscape, prompting established players, such as Dell, HPE, and IBM, to make portfolio development and marketing moves that directly counter the mounting Lenovo threat.
Lenovo is also touting its channel acumen in working with independent software vendor (ISV) application partners. Accordingly, the Lenovo 360 global channel framework enables partners to flexibly access the Lenovo portfolio across services and solutions, infrastructure, and intelligent devices. Plus, Lenovo has expanded its worldwide reach, servicing over 180 markets with 35+ manufacturing facilities, including its first European in-house manufacturing facility recently opened in Hungary.
As a result, Lenovo’s storage portfolio has registered substantial growth in the last year with a company all-time record 138% YTY revenue increase. Overall, I believe Lenovo is delivering the portfolio mix and marketing focus key to making further inroads across the enterprise storage market segment and raising storage ecosystem awareness of adopting new capabilities that can also prove integral in fulfilling their organization-wide strategic sustainability and cybersecurity goals.
Disclosure: Futurum Research 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 Futurum Research as a whole.
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Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
