A Portfolio for a Valuable Asset
Vivek Sharma, MD, India, Lenovo Data Centre Group, talked to us about the growing importance of data centres in the country and his organisation’s contribution in meeting this demand
In your opinion, what will be the impact of Big data, AI and IoT on the IT industry? Data is a company’s most valuable asset – and businesses that are able to effectively capture, make sense of, and use the data collected from the physical, connected world will emerge as frontrunners of their respective industries. The rapid emergence of new technologies combined with the increasing number of ways to integrate them to create more efficient systems is pushing companies to shift from digital transformation to ‘intelligent’ transformation.
AI and IoT are not new to the industry, but the combined effect of these technologies has unprecedentedly restructured how enterprises operate. The relative ease of deploying IoT has enabled real-time processing of data which helps in gathering insights to increase productivity and enhance resource utilisation. Similarly, AI-powered predictive analytics helps in data management by optimizing storage and compute load balancing in real-time - helping organizations to manage servers more efficiently.
AI and IoT are complementary to each other. While the former is about making machines intelligent, the latter is about connecting these machines. Synthesis between these technologies has seen AI evolving alongside the man-machine intelligence continuum, resulting in augmented intelligence – a two-way communication between machines and human, with little to no human intervention. This progression is further fuelled by several drivers like cloud, advance analytics, machine learning, storage, etc. AI has become increasingly critical to IoT’s success, making data through actionable insights enabled by real-time feedback and processing. To break it down, AI enhances IoT solutions by enabling predictive, prescriptive and adaptive analytics, while IoT’s capability to allow real-time responses to adaptive learning systems are critical for them to function. This shows that as AI increasingly converges with IoT, both technologies will become more interdependent.
Leveraging these possibilities, Lenovo aims to bring smarter (intelligent) technology through Smart IoT – connecting devices for free flow of communication and data; Smart Infrastructure – high-quality and customised computing, storage and networking power to support intelligent devices; and Smart Verticals – end-to-end intelligent solutions enabling digital transformation across industries.
What is the role of Cloud in data centres? What are your solutions in this category?
By 2024, the Indian Data Centre market is predicted to be worth $4 billion – driven by a huge demand of IaaS, SaaS and PaaS by enterprises looking to adopt public and private cloud. This uptick is further exacerbated by an increase in the Indian population connecting to the internet and the use of smart devices, which has prompted the government to migrate to digital platforms. In 2018, the central government emphasized increasing investments the country’s cloud and data centre market.
The data centre market has become highly competitive and cloud is a major driving factor. Cloud enables seamless operations by improving IT agility and flexibility to drive business optimization and revenue. And within that are various cloud models that can be used to meet different business goals. A lot of organisations deploy public cloud for the adaptability and simplicity that it offers but are challenged by control and security issues. Those who opt for a private cloud are facing challenges related to complexity, agility and scalability. The realisation of the hybrid cloud as a cohesive solution has been on the rise. To cater to these requirements, Lenovo provides customized, simplified turnkey cloud solutions for private cloud, multi-cloud or hybrid cloud.
From Lenovo’s ThinkAgile systems, ThinkAgile CP Series, a composable cloud platform has proven to a next-gen platform that is easy to implement, deploy, operate, maintain and support. It delivers agility of the public cloud and security and control of private cloud. It is
a fully integrated infrastructure, application marketplace and end-to-end automation of software-defined network, compute and storage. It delivers a turnkey cloud experience that can be easily and centrally managed from anywhere through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) portal.
A brief on solutions offered by Lenovo Data Centre Group
At Lenovo Data Centre Group, we work closely with our software partners to provide our customers with tested and certified IT solutions that are high performance, scalable and cost-effective. Through its data centre solutions, Lenovo draws on the might of high-performance cloud and emerging technologies to provide greater flexibility and choice to deliver innovation, opportunity and growth for customers. Our mission is to become a leader in intelligent transformation, which we aim to achieve through our capabilities in Smart IoT, Smart infrastructure and Smart vertical solutions.
Lenovo delivers a comprehensive portfolio of unique engineered solutions built through our worldwide partner ecosystem, which includes industry-leading brands such as Nutanix, Red Hat, SAP, and VMware. Lenovo is the first vendor to leverage Optane memory on SAP HANA workload with up to 12.5x faster recovery. We have also received the SAP Pinnacle Award as SAP Infrastructure Partner of the Year.
We are driving the adoption of AI through end to end customer engagement and deep partner ecosystem. With our AI Innovation Centres, customers can gain access to the right experts to consult on projects, the right infrastructure to be able to run a Proof of Concept and demonstrate the ROI of projects prior to deployment. Recently, Intel-Lenovo have announced a partnership which is focused on accelerating the Lenovo HPC-Intel AI convergence to extract new levels of customer insight. Another key focus area of this partnership is to optimize Lenovo’s LiCO HPC/AI software stack for Intel’s next generation software and alignment with Intel’s OneAPI programming framework.
What sectors does Lenovo DCG cater to? Are government sectors included?
We cater across verticals such as Finance, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Retail and Government. Lenovo’s unique ability to deliver end-to-end solutions across industries means reduced costs, improved experiences and quicker time to market for our customers.
An example of the type of business we are working with in India is financial services provider, Ashika Group. To keep cash, currency and commodity trading on track, Ashika Group migrated its mission-critical business applications to a reliable, powerful and flexible Lenovo hyperconverged infrastructure, featuring Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. Its IT team decided to look beyond the traditional three-tier architecture set-up in favour of a hyperconverged infrastructure and worked closely with a team from Lenovo Professional Services to install a threenode Lenovo ThinkAgile HX3310 cluster at its primary data center, before migrating the ODIN platform and all other business applications over to the new infrastructure. 30 servers and storage devices were replaced with just three nodes—a tenth of its previous physical footprint. The Lenovo-Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure provides 99.9% uptime and applications run faster too. It now takes less than 30 seconds to reboot an application compared to 15 minutes before. Enhancements like these are empowering Ashika Group to deliver a better, more responsive service to its clients.
We deliver solutions to the government sector as well. An example of Lenovo’s innovative supercomputer system designs includes Direct Warm Water Cooling based HPC system that was deployed for Liquid Propulsion Systems Care (LPSC), an R&D Centre under ISRO. We are working towards being the preferred choice in AI and HCI in the upcoming projects in India.
THE LENOVO-NUTANIX HYPERCONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE PROVIDES 99.9% UPTIME AND APPLICATIONS RUN FASTER TOO. IT NOW TAKES LESS THAN 30 SECONDS TO REBOOT AN APPLICATION COMPARED TO 15 MINUTES BEFORE