Lenovo solutions for data centers. Part 2
In a previous article, we talked about trends in the hardware market, about the transformation of Lenovo and gave examples of implemented projects. We bring to your attention the second part of the story about the announcement of new Lenovo systems and solutions for data centers, where we will talk more about the Intel Purley platform, ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile products.
The new server platform Purley was told by Vasily Lizunov, Intel. This platform has become one of the most important components for both traditional Enterprise solutions and Lenovo's hyper-converged systems. Intel sees the possibility of growth in several directions, the main of which are the cloud economy and big data processing, the so-called “smart big data”. Based on these technologies, new business models emerge, such as smart agriculture, they make retail and other industries change.
Of these two areas, 3 new ones emerge:
Clouds,
Software Defined Infrastructure,
Analytics, supercomputers, smart data, artificial intelligence.
Intel introduced the Xeon Scalable processors in July 2017. Their performance is on average 1.6 times higher than in the E5 / E7. The developments from these two lines were combined into one socket, which also represented great flexibility in configuration. Vasily Lizunov noted that new processors and chipsets should be considered along with other new Intel technologies, including optimized software.
The performance of one core in the crystal increased by 10-15%, if you do not take into account code changes. The performance of the socket has increased due to an increase in the number of cores per chip to 28 in the maximum configuration. The DDR4 memory controller now supports more channels (up to 6). Thanks to the new AVX-512 instructions, the number of flops per cycle doubled.
The crystal, unlike competitors' solutions, remained monolithic and became universal - it can work in configurations with 2, 4 and 8 sockets. For the interaction of all cores Intel uses a mesh-infrastructure.
As part of the Purley platform, all processors are divided into platinum, gold, silver and bronze series. Platinum series processors support up to 28 cores, bronze - up to 8 cores. The presence of middle and junior series allows the customer to save and not overpay for maximum performance in the absence of need. The table with the characteristics of the new processors Intel cited in his blog .
One of the main issues for the IT market is the price. A huge number of vendors offer various equipment, and when buying, customers do not always think about how convenient it will be for them to interact with the system at all stages of its life cycle. Introducing the new product line for data centers, Lenovo focuses on the importance of not only price, but its relationship with customer experience. Read more about this Artyom Zybin, Lenovo.
Lenovo has combined the ThinkServer and System x brands into a single ThinkSystem line. This allowed us to optimize production, simplify the process of ordering and delivering equipment, and reduce the stock of service parts. New server systems use a single set of components - DIMMs, storage options, I / O adapters, power supplies, and microcode.
Technologies for predicting hardware failures, quick fault indication, proactive opening of service requests and many others, which were an integral part of System x, are also used in the new line. Their task is not only to reduce unplanned downtime of equipment, but also to facilitate the life of the system administrator when working with the system.
To improve the usability of the new systems, Lenovo has updated the management tools. The new built-in xClarity Controller supports Redfish APIs, provides downloads to the OS 2 times faster and firmware updates 6 times faster than previous systems. For centralized management of Lenovo's entire infrastructure, customers are encouraged to use xClarity Administrator software, which supports the management of both the new ThinkSystem and the previous generation System x M5 and M4.
At the time of the announcement of Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Lenovo servers set 42 new world records.. For example, the most productive 2-processor server for OLTP applications, parallel computing and virtual environments, a 4-processor server for processing big data and financial transactions.
Security for new systems is provided at several levels. Among them: control of the installation of the original OS, microcode authentication, restriction of access of external devices to control interfaces, selective disabling of unsafe interfaces, access control through a mobile application and physical control system - a keypad that is locked with a key and an opening sensor.
In total, two new ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile brands were introduced 26 new systems: 5 switches, 7 storage systems and 14 servers.
Since this is a review article with a story about the updated Lenovo portfolio as a whole, we will not dwell on each new system or product in this article, but we will talk about them gradually in future publications.
The switches in the new line support speeds of 10, 40 and 100 Gbit / s and are running their own CNOS 10.4. The software is able to predict network outages. The Ethernet switch division moved to Lenovo from IBM as part of an x86 business acquisition deal. In total, this network division is more than 15 years old and it originates from the Nortel division. These are time-tested solutions that are compatible with network products of other companies, are competitive in price, and examples of their installations are present at customers around the world, including in Russia. For example, you may know these products under the brand name Blade Network Technologies (BNT) that were used in the IBM BladeCenter blade chassis.
The new entry-level and mid-tier DS series storage systems offer high performance at a low cost. For example, the all-flash configuration of the DS4200 showed a result of $ 0.14 for IOPS in the SPC-1 v3 test, which is currently the best indicator for entry-level systems. It is worth noting that the basic configuration includes options such as real-time tearing for HDD, Thin Provisioning, SSD read cache, 128 snapshots. For an additional cost, you can add tearing licenses for SSDs, asynchronous replication, and increase the number of snapshots to 1024.
The following server form factors and types of systems are available in the new server line: floor-mounted, rack-mount, blade, high-density, multiprocessor.
Classic rack-mount dual-socket servers are represented by 6 models in three categories, which have a single component base, but differ in price and characteristics - two junior, middle and senior. The presence of middle and junior models allows you to choose the optimal solution and not overpay for unused functionality. For example, if you are not planning to use all 24 RAM slots or maximum processors when solving the problem, then you should pay attention to the younger model for a lower price. Older systems will support Intel 3DXPoint technology with the next generation of Intel Cascade Lake processors, which are expected to be announced in 2018.
Two blade server models are available that are designed to be installed in the Flex System chassis. The chassis itself has not been updated and supports the installation of four generations of blade servers. In doing so, Lenovo continues to protect customers' investment in the existing Flex System blade infrastructure.
High-density systems are represented by the SD530 model, which consists of a 2U chassis in which up to four 2-processor modular servers are installed. I / O in these systems is available in two options: two x8 PCIe slots or one x16 for each modular server in the chassis. In addition, the high-density dual-processor models include the SD650 model with internal water cooling, which is designed to be installed in the NeXtScale chassis and is used, as a rule, in HPC solutions.
The portfolio of multiprocessor servers includes two models: SR850 and SR950. The oldest of them, the SR950, is the world's densest 8-processor system, occupying just 4U in a rack. In addition, it provides record performance when processing big data, financial transactions and databases, including in RAM. To replace components, you do not need to push the server out of the rack and open the cover; the system has a modular architecture.
Software Defined Infrastructure Solutions introduced by ThinkAgile. It is based on the new ThinkSystem servers, on which this or that software is preinstalled, depending on the task being solved. It is worth noting that Lenovo provides service support for all ThinkAgile solutions.
Ready-to-use, pre-configured and optimized Lenovo VX nodes based on VMware vSAN and Lenovo HX based on Nutanix in various configurations are available for building hyperconverged environments.
Software Defined Storage (SDS), as well as hyper-converged solutions, are gaining more and more popularity by lowering the cost of ownership and providing greater flexibility and efficiency compared to traditional storage solutions. They are also the next step and an important component in building a software-defined data center. Lenovo's SDS portfolio of solutions includes systems with file (based on IBM Spectrum Scale), unified (Nexenta or DataCore), object (Cloudian) access to data. In addition, systems with the ability to virtualize and consolidate existing storage systems (DataCore) are available. SDS solutions complement Lenovo's product line of storage products, allow you to store large amounts of data and offer advanced functionality to ensure data protection, availability and integrity.
Lenovo infrastructure for Nutanix or Microsoft Azure Stack can be purchased immediately in the rack as a single hardware-software complex. Solutions of this class are part of the ThinkAgile SX product family. In addition to servers and software, these complexes include Lenovo switches, Lenovo xClarity Administrator management software and other hardware and software components to provide additional integration of the entire stack with the existing customer architecture. Lenovo also has certified reference architectures for OpenStack and VMware Cloud Foundation.
Despite the fact that shipments of ThinkAgile SX hardware and software systems began in September, we already have the first success story. Thanks to the Microsoft Early Adoption Initiative (EAI) program for service providers, in October the world's first installation of the officially certified Microsoft complex for Azure Stack was carried out. Customer is an English ITPS service provider and uses Lenovo ThinkAgile SX for MS Azure Stack.
Most of the announced systems are already available to order. Based on the presented portfolio of ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile products, we are ready to offer a solution and provide comprehensive service support for a wide range of modern tasks: cloud infrastructure, big data and analytics, infrastructure applications, databases, supercomputers and artificial intelligence.
In the following articles we will continue the story of new products and solutions. Now we are preparing an overview of our 8-processor SR950 server.
Detailed technical information and video reviews of ThinkSystem products in English are available here .
See the full Lenovo product catalog for 3D data centers here .
Intel Purley
The new server platform Purley was told by Vasily Lizunov, Intel. This platform has become one of the most important components for both traditional Enterprise solutions and Lenovo's hyper-converged systems. Intel sees the possibility of growth in several directions, the main of which are the cloud economy and big data processing, the so-called “smart big data”. Based on these technologies, new business models emerge, such as smart agriculture, they make retail and other industries change.
Of these two areas, 3 new ones emerge:
Clouds,
Software Defined Infrastructure,
Analytics, supercomputers, smart data, artificial intelligence.
Intel introduced the Xeon Scalable processors in July 2017. Their performance is on average 1.6 times higher than in the E5 / E7. The developments from these two lines were combined into one socket, which also represented great flexibility in configuration. Vasily Lizunov noted that new processors and chipsets should be considered along with other new Intel technologies, including optimized software.
The performance of one core in the crystal increased by 10-15%, if you do not take into account code changes. The performance of the socket has increased due to an increase in the number of cores per chip to 28 in the maximum configuration. The DDR4 memory controller now supports more channels (up to 6). Thanks to the new AVX-512 instructions, the number of flops per cycle doubled.
The crystal, unlike competitors' solutions, remained monolithic and became universal - it can work in configurations with 2, 4 and 8 sockets. For the interaction of all cores Intel uses a mesh-infrastructure.
As part of the Purley platform, all processors are divided into platinum, gold, silver and bronze series. Platinum series processors support up to 28 cores, bronze - up to 8 cores. The presence of middle and junior series allows the customer to save and not overpay for maximum performance in the absence of need. The table with the characteristics of the new processors Intel cited in his blog .
Lenovo ThinkSystem
One of the main issues for the IT market is the price. A huge number of vendors offer various equipment, and when buying, customers do not always think about how convenient it will be for them to interact with the system at all stages of its life cycle. Introducing the new product line for data centers, Lenovo focuses on the importance of not only price, but its relationship with customer experience. Read more about this Artyom Zybin, Lenovo.
Lenovo has combined the ThinkServer and System x brands into a single ThinkSystem line. This allowed us to optimize production, simplify the process of ordering and delivering equipment, and reduce the stock of service parts. New server systems use a single set of components - DIMMs, storage options, I / O adapters, power supplies, and microcode.
Technologies for predicting hardware failures, quick fault indication, proactive opening of service requests and many others, which were an integral part of System x, are also used in the new line. Their task is not only to reduce unplanned downtime of equipment, but also to facilitate the life of the system administrator when working with the system.
To improve the usability of the new systems, Lenovo has updated the management tools. The new built-in xClarity Controller supports Redfish APIs, provides downloads to the OS 2 times faster and firmware updates 6 times faster than previous systems. For centralized management of Lenovo's entire infrastructure, customers are encouraged to use xClarity Administrator software, which supports the management of both the new ThinkSystem and the previous generation System x M5 and M4.
At the time of the announcement of Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Lenovo servers set 42 new world records.. For example, the most productive 2-processor server for OLTP applications, parallel computing and virtual environments, a 4-processor server for processing big data and financial transactions.
Security for new systems is provided at several levels. Among them: control of the installation of the original OS, microcode authentication, restriction of access of external devices to control interfaces, selective disabling of unsafe interfaces, access control through a mobile application and physical control system - a keypad that is locked with a key and an opening sensor.
In total, two new ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile brands were introduced 26 new systems: 5 switches, 7 storage systems and 14 servers.
Since this is a review article with a story about the updated Lenovo portfolio as a whole, we will not dwell on each new system or product in this article, but we will talk about them gradually in future publications.
The switches in the new line support speeds of 10, 40 and 100 Gbit / s and are running their own CNOS 10.4. The software is able to predict network outages. The Ethernet switch division moved to Lenovo from IBM as part of an x86 business acquisition deal. In total, this network division is more than 15 years old and it originates from the Nortel division. These are time-tested solutions that are compatible with network products of other companies, are competitive in price, and examples of their installations are present at customers around the world, including in Russia. For example, you may know these products under the brand name Blade Network Technologies (BNT) that were used in the IBM BladeCenter blade chassis.
The new entry-level and mid-tier DS series storage systems offer high performance at a low cost. For example, the all-flash configuration of the DS4200 showed a result of $ 0.14 for IOPS in the SPC-1 v3 test, which is currently the best indicator for entry-level systems. It is worth noting that the basic configuration includes options such as real-time tearing for HDD, Thin Provisioning, SSD read cache, 128 snapshots. For an additional cost, you can add tearing licenses for SSDs, asynchronous replication, and increase the number of snapshots to 1024.
The following server form factors and types of systems are available in the new server line: floor-mounted, rack-mount, blade, high-density, multiprocessor.
Classic rack-mount dual-socket servers are represented by 6 models in three categories, which have a single component base, but differ in price and characteristics - two junior, middle and senior. The presence of middle and junior models allows you to choose the optimal solution and not overpay for unused functionality. For example, if you are not planning to use all 24 RAM slots or maximum processors when solving the problem, then you should pay attention to the younger model for a lower price. Older systems will support Intel 3DXPoint technology with the next generation of Intel Cascade Lake processors, which are expected to be announced in 2018.
Two blade server models are available that are designed to be installed in the Flex System chassis. The chassis itself has not been updated and supports the installation of four generations of blade servers. In doing so, Lenovo continues to protect customers' investment in the existing Flex System blade infrastructure.
High-density systems are represented by the SD530 model, which consists of a 2U chassis in which up to four 2-processor modular servers are installed. I / O in these systems is available in two options: two x8 PCIe slots or one x16 for each modular server in the chassis. In addition, the high-density dual-processor models include the SD650 model with internal water cooling, which is designed to be installed in the NeXtScale chassis and is used, as a rule, in HPC solutions.
The portfolio of multiprocessor servers includes two models: SR850 and SR950. The oldest of them, the SR950, is the world's densest 8-processor system, occupying just 4U in a rack. In addition, it provides record performance when processing big data, financial transactions and databases, including in RAM. To replace components, you do not need to push the server out of the rack and open the cover; the system has a modular architecture.
Lenovo ThinkAgile
Software Defined Infrastructure Solutions introduced by ThinkAgile. It is based on the new ThinkSystem servers, on which this or that software is preinstalled, depending on the task being solved. It is worth noting that Lenovo provides service support for all ThinkAgile solutions.
Ready-to-use, pre-configured and optimized Lenovo VX nodes based on VMware vSAN and Lenovo HX based on Nutanix in various configurations are available for building hyperconverged environments.
Software Defined Storage (SDS), as well as hyper-converged solutions, are gaining more and more popularity by lowering the cost of ownership and providing greater flexibility and efficiency compared to traditional storage solutions. They are also the next step and an important component in building a software-defined data center. Lenovo's SDS portfolio of solutions includes systems with file (based on IBM Spectrum Scale), unified (Nexenta or DataCore), object (Cloudian) access to data. In addition, systems with the ability to virtualize and consolidate existing storage systems (DataCore) are available. SDS solutions complement Lenovo's product line of storage products, allow you to store large amounts of data and offer advanced functionality to ensure data protection, availability and integrity.
Lenovo infrastructure for Nutanix or Microsoft Azure Stack can be purchased immediately in the rack as a single hardware-software complex. Solutions of this class are part of the ThinkAgile SX product family. In addition to servers and software, these complexes include Lenovo switches, Lenovo xClarity Administrator management software and other hardware and software components to provide additional integration of the entire stack with the existing customer architecture. Lenovo also has certified reference architectures for OpenStack and VMware Cloud Foundation.
Despite the fact that shipments of ThinkAgile SX hardware and software systems began in September, we already have the first success story. Thanks to the Microsoft Early Adoption Initiative (EAI) program for service providers, in October the world's first installation of the officially certified Microsoft complex for Azure Stack was carried out. Customer is an English ITPS service provider and uses Lenovo ThinkAgile SX for MS Azure Stack.
Most of the announced systems are already available to order. Based on the presented portfolio of ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile products, we are ready to offer a solution and provide comprehensive service support for a wide range of modern tasks: cloud infrastructure, big data and analytics, infrastructure applications, databases, supercomputers and artificial intelligence.
In the following articles we will continue the story of new products and solutions. Now we are preparing an overview of our 8-processor SR950 server.
Detailed technical information and video reviews of ThinkSystem products in English are available here .
See the full Lenovo product catalog for 3D data centers here .
