… Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile Servers With Optane …

Lenovo Enterprise Solutions, Pte Ltd. announced a series of upgrades to its ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile data center infrastructure portfolios, aligned with Intel Corp.‘s launch of the 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable processors with Optane DC persistent memory modules.

ThinkSystem SR950

Among the solutions included in the refresh is the company’s ThinkSystem SR950, an industry’s first eight socket server featuring Optane DC persistent memory technology.

In today’s business landscape, CIOs face many challenges: IT spend is increasing while the talent pool is shrinking, enterprises must remain relevant today while innovating for tomorrow, security is more important and the industry is evolving from a hardware purchase to consumption-based model.

To help CIOs navigate this path and manage the increasing amount of data they face, the company is updating 15 ThinkSystem servers and 5 ThinkAgile appliances in the portfolio to include Intel’s newest processors, providing double-digit increases in performance. Additionally, with Intel Optane DC persistent memory, customers can experience 12.5 times faster recovery from planned or unplanned outages (from 50 minutes down to 4 minutes) ⁽¹⁾ and can process more data in in-memory databases, making the solutions for SAP HANA environments.

“Customers today need IT solutions that are built to handle a diverse set of applications and engineered to accelerate workloads for improved business outcomes. Lenovo’s new ThinkSystem servers featuring Intel Optane DC persistent memory are revolutionizing how customers think about application use cases, particularly how they manage their large memory challenges and higher availability of their applications,” said Kamran Amini, VP and GM, data center infrastructure and software-defined solutions, data center group, Lenovo. “These new Lenovo solutions with persistent memory allow for more data and VMs to be stored on a single platform, and for mission critical applications like SAP HANA, they deliver much faster recovery of the data from a planned or unplanned outage. This helps reduce a customer’s overall operating expenses and enables further resiliency within their IT environment.“

“The amount of available data and its importance to business continues to skyrocket,” said Lisa Spelman, VP and GM, Xeon processors and data center marketing, Intel Corp. “Workload optimized platforms equipped with 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Optane DC persistent memory are the tools customers require to thrive in this data-centric era. Intel and Lenovo closely collaborated to enable platforms with up to 8-sockets and over 30TB of memory to help our customers take on their biggest data challenges.“

Customers and partners across many industries with workloads have been anticipating the company’s solutions to deploy the systems.

“With our new ThinkSystem servers, research teams will be able to generate results faster, enabling new discoveries and breakthroughs,” said Ian Fisk, Ph.D., scientific computing core co-director, Simons Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides funding for research in mathematics and the basic sciences. “These new systems deliver even faster processing speeds than previous generations. Lenovo’s reputation as a leader in HPC, and their ability to deliver the servers just days after the new Intel processors became commercially available were real differentiators to us in our selection process.“

ThinkSystem SR650

One industry in particular where faster processing speeds are imperative is financial services. In this market, where datastreams can update millions of times per second, the ability to analyze large volumes of data fast enough to react to changing markets is essential. The STAC-M3 benchmark is an industry standard used to compare technology stacks suitable for managing financial time-series data. As part of refresh announcement, the company – along with KX Systems, Inc., Inc., a subsidiary of First Derivatives plc – is unveiling record-breaking STAC-M3 benchmark results with its ThinkSystem SR950 and SR650 servers featuring Optane DC persistent memory. ⁽²⁾

“Over the past few months Lenovo, Intel and Kx have used Intel Optane technology to set several new STAC-M3 records for systems running kdb+ on a single server,” said Peter Lankford, founder and director, STAC (Securities Technology Analysis Center LLC). “Now, the baseline STAC-M3 results from Lenovo servers using Intel Optane DC persistent memory have set new records in 11 of 17 benchmarks for kdb+ systems usng a 2-socket server and 9 of 17 benchmarks for kdb+ systems using a 4-socket server. In one specific example, the calculation of market statistics that used to take more than half a second on a 2-socket kdb+ system now takes less than 75 milliseconds on the new solution-a speed acceleration of more than 7x.” ⁽³⁾

“Today’s STAC-M3 results represent significant improvement for customers demanding higher performance with their in-memory trade analytics with Kx. What will be of particular interest to our customers is that we gained these improvements without making any structural changes to our code. We simply took advantage of the Intel Optane DC persistent memory being used to hold persisted historical data,” said Glenn Wright, senior systems architect, Kx Systems. “The kdb+ database, combined with Intel Optane DC persistent memory and Lenovo ThinkSystem servers, again produced record-breaking results with the I/O-intensive and compute-intensive STAC-M3 benchmark, setting a new set of expectations for performance.“

In addition to these ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile portfolio additions, the company is also developing a series of engineered solutions designed for key workloads. Three of these (SAP HANA, SQL Server and Red Hat OpenShift Containers) will be verified by Intel as Intel Select Solutions, taking advantage of the 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable processor, signifying workload performance, ease of deployment and simplified evaluation. Lenovo offers more Intel Select Solutions than any other vendor. In the coming months, the firm also expects to introduce additional Intel Select Solutions utilizing the 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable Processor including VMware vSAN, Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI), Blockchain Hyperledger Fabric, & Microsoft Azure Stack HCI.

All of these upgraded and these offerings are available through the company’s sales representatives and channel partners. Systems can be purchased directly and are also available through firm’s recently announced Truscale Infrastructure Services, a consumption-based, as-a-service offering that allows customers to use and pay for data center hardware and services without having to purchase the equipment.

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November 27, 2018 | Press Release

⁽¹⁾ SAP HANA simulated workload for SAP BW edition for SAP HANA Standard Application Benchmark Version 2 as of May 30, 2018. Baseline configuration with traditional DRAM: ThinkSystem SR950 server with 8xXeon Platinum 8176M processors (28 cores, 165W, 2.1GHz). Total memory consists of 48x16GB TruDDR4* 2,666 MHz RDIMMS and uses SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 03 with a 6TB dataset. Average start time for all data finished after table preload for ten iterations: 50 minutes. New configuration with a combination of DRAM and Optane DC persistent memory: ThinkSystem SR950 server with 8 Xeon Platinum 8176M processors (28 cores, 165W, 2.1GHz). Total memory consists of 48x16GB TruDDR4* 2,666 MHz RDIMMs and 48x128GB Optane DC persistent memory modules and uses SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 03 with a 6TB dataset. Average start time for all data finished after table preload for ten iterations: four minutes (12.5x improvement).
⁽²⁾ The STAC Reports are available. Results are available for SR650 and SR950 systems when the database resided on Optane DC persistent memory used as storage, as well as for the same systems when the database resided on Intel SSD DC P4510 (3D NAND) drives.
⁽³⁾ Mean STAC-M3.ß1.1T.STATS-UI.TIME score for SUT ID KDB190320 versus previous best score for a two-socket system using kdb+.