Lenovo and VMware Announce New Alliance to Deliver SDDC Offerings 

Lenovo today announced plans for broad collaboration and partnership with VMware to help clients fully realize the benefits of a software-defined data center by delivering compelling new IT infrastructure solutions for private and hybrid cloud, end user computing, and virtualization. This alliance extends the 16 year development relationship between System x and VMware, which has produced a number of innovations including the first VMware embedded hypervisor and broadens the alliance to include the full range of Lenovo’s expanded server business.

Software-defined data center technologies extend the concept of server virtualization to networking and storage infrastructure resources, enabling delivery of compute, networking, and storage resources as a service. Lenovo and VMware solutions will bring together Lenovo’s servers and networking hardware with VMware infrastructure to help enterprises and service providers simplify the data center, speed application provisioning, and reduce costs. Areas of collaboration include:

• Private and hybrid cloud infrastructure solutions based on validated end-to-end architectures to provide clients a fast path to an optimal environment, and integration between Lenovo server and networking hardware, and resource management capabilities, with VMware vRealize Suite for rapid provisioning of systems and services.
• Lenovo is a top-of-rack networking development partner for VMware NSX, and will deliver flexible network virtualization gateway and integrated traffic management solutions, enabling an open, software-defined foundation for agile, flexible, and scalable cloud environments.
• Elastic, scalable, and resilient Software Defined Storage infrastructure solutions based on a wide range of Lenovo servers and VMware Virtual SAN software in simple-to-deploy configurations to suit a broad range of data storage, performance, and budget requirements.
• Enhanced performance of end-user virtual desktop services through Lenovo eXFlash technology, which is a server-based storage solution providing extremely low latency, coupled with VMware Horizon virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) platform.
• Joint solution marketing and enablement of the companies’ business partner and service provider channels.

“We are pleased to continue to work closely with Lenovo to help our mutual customers realize the benefits of a software-defined data center,” said Raghu Raghuram, executive vice president, Software-Defined Data Center Division, VMware. “With the combination of VMware and Lenovo solution, we are empowering organizations with powerful automation, agility and flexibility in their IT infrastructure.”