Lenovo Innovation First-Hand: The Green Solutions Center

Inside Lenovo’s Executive Briefing Center is a functioning data center where customers and partners play around with technology experts to find and feel first-hand the best solution that fits their needs.

The Lenovo Green Solutions Center is a data center showcase arena which is basically, “a petting zoo for our technology,” said Steve Loeschorn, a senior product specialist at Lenovo who provides demos and tours of the center.

Loeschorn provides demonstrations to everyone from enterprise and SMB clients to channel partners in the center. He can be seen ripping out various components of a Lenovo rack to show attendees the guts of hardware, which is live but not in production.

“They’re actually able to see the equipment and feel it,” said Loeschorn. “I’m able to actually use this infrastructure as part of the demonstrations.”

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The center provides real-life use cases and technology expertise around Lenovo’s full range of software-defined data center infrastructure, cooling systems and cutting-edge innovations including artificial intelligence.

For example, Lenovo’s ThinkAgile HX Series, which partners Lenovo hardware with Nutanix software, is on full display. When the rack is opened, a screen above provides information around the products inside and current use cases in production for customers to learn about.

“We’re able to take a combination of virtualization, storage, memory and CPU and bring it all together for a customer infrastructure needs. This might be the example where I would use a retail environment to show that they can bring their entire infrastructure together on this [HX Series] platform,” he said.

Another prime example of innovative data center technology on display inside the Green Solutions Center is Lenovo’s new-generation cooling systems. Lenovo’s Neptune family of products is showcased throughout the center with its direct water cooling innovation that saves energy and costs.

“These heatsinks are cool to the touch because we’re actually using water to move the heat that’s generated by the platform. Ninety-percent of the heat that’s created by the server and the memory is actually transferred to the water loop, allowing customers to get much better energy saving by doing that direct water cooling,” said Loeschorn.

The Green Solutions Center is located inside Lenovo’s Data Center Executive Briefing Center in Raleigh, N.C.