Lenovo's as-a-service platform infrastructure solution providing benefits of an on-premise cloud in hybrid environment: Amit Luthra

Today, industries are reshaping and reimaging what they make and how they do it. Virtual healthcare. Remote education. Smarter shopping. Smarter technology must be made for all. Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) is a smart infrastructure solutions provider to organizations of all sizes. Amit Luthra, MD India, Lenovo ISG, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: Elaborate on the new Infrastructure Solutions V3 portfolio, with advanced ThinkSystem, ThinkAgile, and ThinkEdge servers and storage.

Amit Luthra: Recently launched as part of Lenovo ThinkSystem’s 30th Anniversary celebrations, our new Infrastructure Solutions V3 bring a comprehensive and the largest portfolio enhancement in our history of innovation. The V3 portfolio offers scalable solutions for businesses to bring greater agility, resiliency, and performance in their operations. It includes ThinkSystem, ThinkAgile, and ThinkEdge portfolio, encompassing the next-gen servers and storage systems recognized as the industry’s most reliable and secure systems.

• The new ThinkSystem Hybrid Storage (DE) solution enables businesses to accelerate performance, enhance availability, boost IOPs, and increase density with a hybrid system suited for modern enterprise applications, such as big data/analytics, technical computing, video surveillance, and backup and recovery.
  
• The ThinkAgile V3 is a next-generation hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solution, which provides the customers the convenience of a cloud-like experience along with the security features of an on-premise solution – offers ultimate flexibility and pre-integrated software with strong partner ecosystem including Microsoft, Nutanix, and VMware.
  
• ThinkEdge AI servers are securely authenticated and activated on Lenovo Open Cloud Automation (LOC-a) version, which accelerates business insights with a fully operational edge system within minutes or hours.

DQ: Elaborate on the enhanced Lenovo ThinkShield security, equipping businesses with greater agility, resiliency, and performance.

Amit Luthra: While rapid technology advancements are creating new frontier technology, it also means banking more on ‘data’ which continues to be vulnerable and targeted using new methods. According to a recent research by Ponemon Institute, Indian businesses lost an average of $2.21 million (Rs 17.6 crore) in 2021 to $2.32 million (Rs 18.48 crore) this year due to data breaches.

Modern IT infrastructures must be fortified against increasingly sophisticated security threats and support the highest levels of business continuity. This is why, Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions V3 includes enhanced ThinkShield Security capabilities with industry’s most modern infrastructure security capabilities, providing businesses with enhanced IT resiliency. Key aspects include:

System Guard: Monitors hardware for unexpected changes and conducts periodic verification,

Modular Root of Trust design: Places security-sensitive components onto a single modular, tamper-detectable board that is swapped when replacing system boards.

Updated support for data storage and transfer protection to meet the latest security standards.

Our strength lies in offering integrated end-to-end infrastructure solutions from edge to the cloud – that means security is covered from devices to the cloud and even at the edge.

DQ: What is the Lenovo XClarity One cloud-based, unified software management platform?

Amit Luthra: The new Lenovo XClarity One is an industry-first open-cloud software management platform. Besides providing visibility into infrastructure performance, usage metering, and support analytics, customers can also easily customize where management data resides, from public to private, across hybrid multi-cloud environments. This is extremely critical in today’s tech-first business environment, as organizations are strategizing how efficiently and effectively, they can manage and prioritize mission critical data.

DQ: How does it provide an industry-first integration of TruScale Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Management-as-a-Service, and Smarter Support analytics to simplify orchestration, automation, and metering from edge to cloud?

Amit Luthra: The platform provides a modern, intuitive interface, and integrates TruScale Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Management-as-a-Service, and Smarter Support analytics. XClarity is a family of tools that help administrators to deploy, manage, optimize, and secure their servers, storage, networking, and solutions. With the XClarity One unified platform, these tools will now be available in the cloud and on-premises to simplify the system management experience via one centralized platform.

Customers are further equipped with capabilities of deploying and managing solutions remotely including, remote automation, authentication, provisioning, etc. With Smarter Support, the platform offers faster time to resolution, and elimination of service calls for common challenges through enhanced management of issues, alongside predictive customer notification and remediation.

DQ: How can the next-generation Lenovo Neptune warm water cooling and CO2 Offset Services help customers achieve their sustainability goals?

Amit Luthra: Lenovo has always strived to enable customers to achieve their sustainability goals through innovations in power efficiency. The Fifth Generation Lenovo Neptune Direct Water-Cooling, is one of Lenovo’s innovative solutions to help reduce power consumption and improve thermal efficiencies.

Lenovo Neptune provides alternative cooling solutions that range from liquid-assisted air cooling to direct water-cooled CPUs and GPUs. The solution helps customers reduce 40% of power costs from a 3.5 times improvement in thermal efficiencies versus air-cooled systems.

Lenovo has also introduced their new CO2 Offset Services which will enable the customers to offset emissions by supporting United Nations Climate Action projects that aim to reduce carbon emissions by a measurable and verifiable amount.

DQ: What is the Lenovo status with all business sizes for everything-as-a-service model?

Amit Luthra: Businesses today look for avenues to reduce complexities and gain ultimate flexibility for their IT infrastructure investments. This is where as-a-service, consumption-based models are gaining prominence for not just small businesses, but large enterprises as well.

Through Lenovo TruScale, our pay-as-you-go consumption-based model, we are offering end-to-end infrastructure solutions, everything-as-a-service – from DaaS to IaaS. With greater scalability, flexibility and reliable solutions, businesses can better focus more on leveraging IT than managing it, to stay ahead in the competitive market.

An as-a-Service platform infrastructure solution will provide businesses with the benefits of an on-premise cloud environment in a hybrid environment. It also allows businesses to reduce their complexities using one solution, one provider, one contract, and a single point of accountability.

DQ: What are the key verticals driving profitability for Lenovo ISG in India, and why?

Amit Luthra: This has been a harvest year for us as Lenovo ISG – became profitable for consecutive quarters. We have seen increased demand in ISG’s storage, software, services, and HPC segments across all industries. Customers are increasingly looking at opting Lenovo TruScale to simplify and enhance their IT and management.

We embark on the trust and customer-first approach. We constantly aspire, and have become the trusted tech partners for many organizations such as Hero Motocorp, Delhi University CGMCP, CSIR IGIB, etc. Our strategic focus on becoming one of the fastest growing end-to-end infrastructure providers has enabled us to balance scale and profitability.