Today, Lenovo Data Center Group (DCG) announces new end-to-end data management solutions allowing customers of all sizes to harness data more securely and efficiently, from edge to core to cloud, with a single set of tools and capabilities for a smarter way forward.
Data management solutions will be extremely beneficial for South African organisations as many are now prioritising cloud migration and data management to assist in the country’s economic recovery plan. After what has been a whirlwind of a year, multiple organisations have acknowledged the importance of a digital transformation strategy and how it aids in collecting, transforming and normalising data.
“As South Africa’s professional services sector continues to adopt a remote-work system in their offices, it is imperative that we present data solutions that will not only protect sensitive data, but also encourage digital transformation within our new age of work.” says Jim Holland, Regional Director and Data Centre Expert at Lenovo DCG. “With organisations across Sub-Saharan Africa being forced to adapt to an ‘on-screen’ work lifestyle, cloud services have become instrumental for business continuity and efficiency across the region. We, at Lenovo, trust that our new ThinkSystem will assist corporations of all sizes to adopt a data management plan that will benefit both their market share and newly formed workplace”.
Accelerating Data Insights and Reducing Data Management Costs from Edge to Cloud
The new Lenovo ThinkSystem DM5100F brings high-performance, low-latency all-NVMe storage at an affordable price point, enabling customers of all sizes to enhance analytics and AI deployments, while accelerating applications’ access to data. The Lenovo DM Series storage systems now include new S3 Object support, to create a next generation unified data management platform. This platform allows customers to manage and analyse all data types (block, file and object) within a single storage platform, accelerating the processing of data analytics while reducing infrastructure costs. These enhancements create expanded data protection capabilities, with transparent failover and management of object storage natively. Additionally, with Lenovo DM Series storage, customers can add cold-data tiering from hard drives to the cloud, or replicate data to the cloud. This enables an economical multi-cloud strategy for storage, reducing the overall cost of data management.
Whilst South Africa could finish the year as one of the fastest-growing major IT market in the world, many organisations are still failing to capitalise on the move to the cloud. Common mistakes organisations make are, for example, keeping systems up 24/7 and not investing in multilayered cybersecurity strategies. Outdated habits such as these are no longer viable for an organisation’s operations – especially with data breaches having become an infamous act of crime within the country. Overall, IT spending in South Africa will total R303.46 billion in 2019, a 3.9% increase from 2018, according to Gartner. Therefore, by achieving 3.9% growth in 2019, the country verifies its place as one of the fastest-growing countries in the world — ranked fourth globally.
Therefore, to help mitigate data management costs, Lenovo delivers an enhanced Lenovo ThinkSystem Intelligent Monitoring 2.0 software solution, a cloud-based management platform that uses AI to simplify and automate the care and optimisation of Lenovo’s ThinkSystem storage environment. Customers can monitor and manage storage capacity and performance for multiple locations from a single cloud-based interface, predict issues before they happen, and receive prescriptive guidance.
Not only will this new data technology be cost-efficient for both big and small corporations, it will also assist companies in becoming POPIA compliant; as top concerns around POPIA compliance included: more data breaches, fines, complexity of compliance, not being ready in time and compliance making business more difficult. Decision-makers should therefore not be swayed by the cost of this technology, but rather focus on the business relevance it brings to their organisations.
To further accelerate the performance of customers’ applications, Lenovo announces the new Lenovo DB720S Fibre Channel Switch. This switch provides 32Gbps and 64Gbps storage networking, delivering higher speed and 50 percent lower latency than previous generations. The DB720S delivers autonomous SAN infrastructure with self-learning, self-optimising, and self-healing capabilities, leading to reduced downtime and simplified storage network management.
Bringing Affordable and Flexible Analytic and AI Solutions to Entry and Mid-Sized Organisations
As AI moves from the realm of research and science to delivering insights and automation for enterprises, Lenovo is focused on partnering and enabling this value for businesses of all sizes. Lenovo recently collaborated with NetApp and NVIDIA to publish a Reference Architecture for an AI training system. The architecture combines ThinkSystem SR670 servers with NVIDIA GPUs and ThinkSystem DM5000F All-Flash storage, to help take the guesswork out of optimising an AI platform.
Learn more about Lenovo’s analytics and AI solutions portfolio and breakthrough HPC and AI solutions building a smarter way forward.
