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Lenovo's enterprise power-up could be powering you down

Radical server re-designs needed soon, but for now the focus is on prosaic problems

The question Lenovo's asked most often is how to address heating, cooling and power requirements in the data centre and the company is thinking about how to get better at managing these concerns.

So says John Donovan, Lenovo's executive director for enterprise product management, who today artfully avoided telling The Register just what the company has up its sleeve but did offer some broad hints about future directions.

Some future directions are obvious: Donovan says NVMe prices should fall before long, so servers will need more PCIe lanes to cope with demand for the storage medium once it's affordable and used at scale. Designing servers with lots more PCIe is therefore something Lenovo engineers are having fun with. So is power and cooling, because as Donovan pointed out NVMe runs at 25 watts so will heat things up and suck plenty of electrons. New form factors are also on the agenda.

It's not just future storage technologies that are motivating Lenovo's wonks: customers in places like China don't have reliable access to power. Figuring out how to let them run racks on less 'leccy than is available elsewhere is also on Lenovo's mind, and the trickle down effects for global customers won't hurt.

But the big shifts Donovan sees are storage-related. NVMe will, he feels, accelerate the move to Flash storage with NVMe as one tier. Servers and networks alike will need to be able to cope with that. Lenovo's multiple hyper-converged bets are one way it will address that challenge. They're also a way it gets into the storage business without having to get into the mucky business of becoming a storage company.

Donovan said Lenovo's recent alliance with Juniper was made for similar reasons: the company says there's only so many things at which it can be an expert, so will partner to get deep into other fields. Lenovo will keep making its own basic SANs and switches, but will leave the more complicated kit to others.

The Register hears Lenovo is close to staging a coming out party of sorts, revealing the fruits of its acquisition and setting some new directions.

One new initiative is a network of innovation labs Donovan said are already looking at server designs three to five years into the future, beyond technologies like NVMe and 3Dxpoint. He couldn't say just what those technologies might be, but he's chuffed that Lenovo is trying to sniff them out and attributes this far-sighted approach to the swift and happy assimilation of IBM's x86 business into Lenovo. ®

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