Lenovo companions its method up the storage maker rankings
Lenovo is notable amongst storage array makers for a latest fast rise in market share, and the prominence of the partnering technique it has employed to get there.
Whereas it lacks some issues that the majority different storage makers possess – specifically its personal cloud, or cloud provide through the hyperscalers, or a container administration platform – it does cowl the complete vary of flash and disk storage necessities from entry-level/SME to high-end synthetic intelligence (AI) use instances.
In recent times, it has almost doubled storage system market share and gone from eighth within the rankings to fourth by 2023, in accordance with IDC. In the meantime, it’s prime canine in storage techniques of lower than $25,000, additionally in accordance with IDC.
It has achieved a lot of this with a complete vary of partnerships. IBM got here first and endures through the laptop computer traces, but in addition in storage with SpectrumScale and TS tape merchandise. In the meantime, re-badged NetApp {hardware} types a really important a part of Lenovo’s storage provide.
There are additionally Lenovo-branded storage merchandise that make use of partnerships with Nutanix (hyper-converged), Microsoft Azure (hybrid cloud on-site techniques), VMware (vSan), Weka (scale-out NAS), and Cloudian (object storage).
On this article, we take a look at the origins of Lenovo, its key storage merchandise, its place within the markets, its method to the cloud, containers, and consumption fashions of storage buying.
The place did Lenovo come from?
Lenovo was fashioned in Beijing in 1984, then named as “Legend”, by a group of engineers led by Liu Chuanzhi and Danny Lui. It initially specialised in televisions however later diversified in direction of computing. It subsequently acquired permission to type a subsidiary in Hong Kong and moved its HQ there a while after.
By 1990, the corporate had began to make computer systems, with early efforts together with a mainframe and IBM-compatible machines aimed on the Chinese language market. A primary IPO in 1994 in Hong Kong noticed the corporate go public, and it had captured almost half of the Chinese language home market by 1996.
It re-branded to the identify Lenovo in 2003 – “Le” from it is earlier identify Legend, and “novo” from the Latin for brand new – and in 2005 it purchased IBM’s private laptop enterprise with its ThinkPad laptops and ThinkCentre desktop traces. IBM nonetheless has a share in Lenovo, which was gained throughout that deal.
Since then, it left then re-joined the smartphone market, fashioned a three way partnership within the PC market with the Japanese agency NEC, and later purchased IBM’s x86 server enterprise.
Its first foray into information storage was a three way partnership in 2013 with EMC, which took the prevailing US-based firm Iomega and re-branded its merchandise into the LenovoEMC model. All these merchandise have since been retired.
In 2017, Lenovo partnered with storage virtualisation stalwart DataCore and used its software program in its storage merchandise.
In 2018, Lenovo partnered with NetApp in an association that stands to this present day.
Lenovo has not been topic to sanctions or something like the identical safety considerations as fellow China-based firm Huawei, however it has been topic to some accusations about bloatware, information exploits and safety vulnerabilities.
How does Lenovo rank towards different storage gamers?
In 2023, IDC ranked Lenovo 4th by way of market share with 7.7%. That’s up considerably from 2022 when Lenovo market share was 4.1% and final of the highest eight storage distributors – we’ve not coated Lenovo beforehand in our prime 5 or 6 of storage array makers.
Prime of the 2023 rankings is Dell with 26.1% market share, with Huawei (9.7%) and HPE (8.3%) above Lenovo. Behind Lenovo come NetApp (7%), Pure Storage (6.1%), Hitachi Vantara (4.9%) and IBM (4.7%).
Given Lenovo’s rise within the storage array provider rankings, it’s no shock that’s mirrored by wholesome revenues for its Infrastructure Options Group (ISG), of which its storage enterprise is a component. It closed its 2022 fiscal 12 months with greater than $7bn in income, up from $5.5bn in 2020. Lenovo’s ISG types about 10% of its total company income.
Lenovo has declared it desires to be primary in storage infrastructure. In 2023 – the identical interval as the general rankings above – Lenovo was primary in IDC’s value bands 1 to 4, which coated exterior storage tools of lower than $25,000, which represented 61% of all storage units offered globally on the time.
Within the Fortune World 500 rankings, Lenovo is available in at quantity 196.
What are Lenovo’s key storage merchandise?
Lenovo’s storage array merchandise comprise of:
- ThinkSystem DG arrays, which embrace the presently accessible DG5000 and DG7000, with DG5200 and DG7200 upgrades coming quickly. They run NetApp’s Ontap working system and are based mostly on NetApp C-Sequence AFF arrays.
- The DG5000 is a 2U all-flash QLC array that may take as much as 48 15.36TB drives for a most capability of 737TB and affords file and block entry with Ethernet and Fibre Channel connectivity. The DG7000 scales to 1.47PB.
- Lenovo DM collection arrays are additionally OEMed NetApp {hardware}. They arrive in NVMe and SAS flash and disk variants and vary from 737TB uncooked capability to multi petabytes and provide block, file and object entry.
- DE collection arrays are based mostly on NetApp’s E and EF collection arrays, which run the Santricity OS moderately than Ontap.
- Lenovo additionally affords software-defined – albeit appliance-based – and hyper-converged merchandise.
- The ThinkAgile HX collection relies on Nutanix software program and Lenovo server {hardware}.
- ThinkAgile MX and SMX merchandise are based mostly on Microsoft Azure’s Arc and Stack platforms that permit infrastructure to be constructed throughout the datacentre and cloud.
- ThinkAgile VX bundles Lenovo servers with VMware vSAN to offer a hyper-converged answer.
- Lenovo Excessive-Efficiency File System makes use of Weka Knowledge Platform storage software program to offer scale-out NAS focused at AI use instances.
- Lenovo DSS-G supplies IBM SpectrumScale scale-out storage on its ThinkSystem V3 servers.
- Lenovo Object Storage makes use of Cloudian object storage software program.
- Lenovo Ceph Storage Options makes use of ThinkSystem compute nodes and comes as object storage or unified (block, file and object).
- Lenovo additionally sells D collection JBOD growth models and IBM TS collection tape storage {hardware}.
- Lenovo targets AI workloads with configured bundles that embrace AI Starter Kits and GPT-in-a-Field options.
- In one other AI play, Lenovo introduced in January that it will purchase high-performance block storage array maker Infinidat, however that deal is but to progress additional than such bulletins – in public, a minimum of.
What markets and workloads does Lenovo goal?
As talked about above, Lenovo holds a commanding benefit within the lower-end of the storage array market. It affords value-for-money techniques, largely based mostly on third-party provider storage expertise and its server {hardware}.
Having stated that, it additionally underwent a serious refresh earlier this 12 months aimed toward offering AI-ready storage and hyper-converged infrastructure for patrons of all its arrays, from entry stage to multi-petabyte scale.
How does the cloud match Lenovo technique?
Lenovo has no cloud storage of its personal, apart from a branded model of Dropbox. It additionally lacks any form of over-arching hybrid cloud-capable management airplane. However it does promote storage arrays that, for instance, use Microsoft Azure merchandise that bridge the datacentre and cloud places.
What’s the Lenovo container technique?
Lenovo affords configured stacks aimed toward operating Kubernetes, comparable to through Azure Kubernetes Service, Pink Hat OpenShift and Canonical. However it lacks the form of administration platform for containerised functions that different distributors use to assist clients handle container storage, information safety, and so forth.
What consumption fashions of buying does Lenovo provide?
Leno’s pay-as-you-go provide known as Truscale. It goals to offer a cloud-like expertise for on-premise infrastructure.
TruScale affords consumption-based storage billing on a mean TB monthly, non-disruptive migration, monitoring and alerting, and administration. Lenovo manages the {hardware} refresh cycle. Clients pays for various ranges of provision that modify by ranges of capability progress attainable, whether or not tech refreshes are included and the period of phrases.
Lenovo additionally affords Truscale for quite a lot of workloads, comparable to lenovo Truscale AI, Truscale for high-performance computing, Truscale backup with Veeam, hybrid cloud with Microsoft Azure and for VMware.
