Lenovo ThinkSystem SE350 Edge Servers Certified to Run Sunlight NexVisor

Sunlight.io Ltd., edge infrastructure company, has certified Lenovo‘s compact and rugged ‘Edge Compute Server’ – the ThinkSystem SE350 – for use with Sunlight’s HCI stack.

ThinkSystem SE350

Certification results confirm the combined solution is for data-intensive applications at the edge, such as IoT and AI due to the small footprint and high performance.

The use of applications such as AI and IoT often requires decisions to be made in real time, close to the source. For example, adjusting blade pitch on a wind turbine in response to changing wind conditions, or spotting and picking a defective component off a conveyor belt on the factory floor. These use cases require fast time to decision, in environments that are far from ideal – often with limited space and power and intermittent connectivity.

Lenovo has responded to these requirements with its ThinkSystem SE350. It offers smart connectivity, security, and manageability for workloads running in harsh environments.

Coupled with Sunlight’s HCI, it is a platform for deploying multi-tenant VM-based and cloud-native applications with HA, performance and centralised management at low cost.

The 2 companies conducted certification testing on the SE350 in Lenovo’s demo lab in Stuttgart, Germany.

The testing proved full system compatibility, and also:

• Complete Sunlight HCI stack can be installed on the SE350 in under an hour

• Sunlight memory overhead was less than 5% of total system resources – leaving maximum capacity for applications

• Storage performance available to VMs was nearly 2 million IO/s across a 2-node cluster

Full and transparent test results, configurations and methodology can be found at performance.sunlight.io.

Florian Pawletta, business development DACH, Lenovo, said: “We created the ThinkSystem SE350 to be small and rugged enough to run anywhere – it can even be hung on the wall of a smart factory – without compromising on performance. We’re delighted to have assisted Sunlight in certifying the SE350. Our customers are increasingly looking for ways to simplify their edge architectures – and Sunlight plus SE350 offers a great way to do that.“

Julian Chesterfield, founder and CEO, Sunlight, said: “The Lenovo SE350 is a powerful multi-purpose edge device. We showed that running it with Sunlight allows multiple applications to be run with HA, full isolation and access to millions of IO/s of storage performance – all in a two node cluster. That’s not possible with regular data center hyperconverged solutions as they take up most of an edge cluster’s resources just to boot – let alone run applications.“

About Sunlight
It makes performance possible anywhere – from the cloud to the edge. Its HCI stack makes applications like AI, big data, analytics and rendering run 3x faster compared to legacy virtualization, and because the firm has a tiny footprint, it’s for the edge. Enterprises and MSPs use Sunlight to cut the costs of delivering performance IT by 70%.