Lenovo and StorMagic Offer Hyperconverged Solutions for ROBO/Small Biz

By Charles King, Pund-IT, Inc.  August 19, 2015

Lenovo and StorMagic announced new low-cost hyperconverged solutions designed for remote office/branch office (ROBO) markets and small businesses. The offerings are ideal for distributed enterprises and SMBs, providing a highly available, reliable and simple bundled solution that can be tailored to specific environments.

The new hyperconverged solutions leverage Lenovo’s portfolio of enterprise servers, including the entry-level 1U ThinkServer RS140 and System x3250 M5 products, as well as the high performance 2U ThinkServer RD650. Added to these servers is StorMagic’s SvSAN software-defined storage platform. Starting at $5,000, the new solutions provide cost effective and highly available environments for retail, banking, education and hospitality customers with multi-site offices, along with numerous small business scenarios.

The solution offers organizations a low cost-of-entry for shared storage in virtualized environments. Lenovo also claimed that the systems can deliver up to a 40 percent decrease in TCO via reduced power, cooling and maintenance costs and a minimized need for dedicated IT resources.

SvSAN and Lenovo’s servers are easily scalable as storage needs grow and can support multiple hypervisor platforms, streamlining integration with existing infrastructures. The new offerings also leverage an intuitive interface that allows multiple shared storage bundles to be centrally managed and provisioned quickly and simply, either locally, or remotely.

The new StorMagic and Lenovo hyperconverged solutions are now available in North America starting at $5,000 and are distributed through Arrow Electronics.

The pitch

Lenovo and StorMagic partner to deliver hyperconverged solutions for ROBO environments and small businesses.

Final analysis

There is a long tradition of IT solutions designed for ROBO environments that also resonate with small business customers. Why that’s true is pretty straightforward. In both cases, workplaces tend to lack dedicated space for IT infrastructures, making compactness a singular virtue. In addition, reliability, ease of use and manageability are critical factors.

Why? Because companies with ROBO facilities want systems to stay up and running, with minimal demands on local staff and as few costly service calls as possible. Small businesses are in slightly different, though complementary circumstances. Few have workers knowledgeable about technology, let alone dedicated IT staff. So an ideal solution is one that can be deployed, managed and maintained with as little interference, cost and pain as possible.

The new Lenovo and StorMagic hyperconverged offerings are designed to deliver just those kinds of value propositions. The solutions leverage Lenovo’s well-tested servers (both its homegrown systems and a 1U server acquitted in the IBM System x acquisition).

Plus, StorMagic is an excellent choice to partner with in this venture. The company’s SvSAN is a well-regarded solution. In fact, earlier this year, VMware named StorMagic’s platform the best two server virtual SAN for remote office/branch office environments. The company also offers a version of SvSAN for Microsoft Hyper-V environments.

Overall, the new Lenovo/StorMagic offerings appear to be well-considered solutions that leverage the company’s individual, complementary technologies into solid hyperconverged systems valuable in their target markets. Both enterprises looking for ways to support ROBO locations and small businesses ready to step up to two server virtual SAN environments would be wise to investigate Lenovo and StorMagic’s new solutions.

© 2015 Pund-IT, Inc. All rights reserved.