Lenovo partners with DataCore to deliver data-focused SDS solution

Lenovo and DataCore have announced a new local partnership, which will see the release of the Lenovo x3650 software-defined storage solution powered by DataCore's SANsymphony-V that will be targeted to help enterprises access their data sets faster.

Underlining the partnership will be DataCore's plans to invest 20 percent of its total revenue in its 2016 research and development strategy.

DataCore Asia Pacific vice president Jamie Humphrey told ZDNet the company sees the R&D for its latest software-driven platform as a priority, given that more enterprises are looking for solutions that can help deliver data sets faster.

"To be honest, I've worked with other companies where you only get a chance to take one bite out of the cherry of a data infrastructure capability, and if you get that wrong it's really hard to come back from," he said.

The R&D strategy will consist of developing parallel I/O processing, virtual I/O, universal data services, and simplicity and automation.

Humphrey claimed the new SDS solution will be a single stack adaptive infrastructure that will give customers the option to use modern or traditional based methodologies to create data-focused environments in either virtualised or physical form.

He added that having a single capability will give customers an "end to end approach that is not bound by silos", and that there will be "no need to rip and replace" existing storage infrastructure.

"We ship more servers now under the virtual era than we did in the physical era, yet the efficiency gains for virtualisation ... were centered on a compute tier," Humphrey said.

"What we're trying to say now is we can use those servers that are deployed out there today, and those storage infrastructures that are deployed out there today in a brand new way that will drive more efficiency, scalability, and ultimately more availability for the data sets and data applications that need the support."

The new SDS infrastructure will be an additional virtualised solution made available on Lenovo's x86 servers, which the company acquired from IBM for $2.3 billion in 2014.

Lenovo Australia alliances manager Andrew Silvers said the idea of increasing its virtual storage options is to give customers and partners added variety. Other virtual storage partnerships Lenovo have inked in the past include the likes of VMware, Simplivity, and Nutanix.

"What's similar about all of those is they sit on x86 hardware, and we do want to give customers a choice....in the case of DataCore it can integrate with existing storage, and that's a very big difference," he said.

"In terms of which goes the best in the marketplace, they all have plus and minuses. We want to enable all of our partners to sell what's right for the customer."

In May last year, Lenovo refreshed its x86 servers with the roll out of two Flex System X6 Computer Nodes and a pair of System x rack servers.