Lenovo Launches HPC As-A-Service To Fight Dell Apex, HPE GreenLake

‘Although GreenLake and Apex are similar offerings to the market, we continue to see Lenovo being a channel-first company that is light years ahead of Dell and HPE when it comes to true partnership,’ says Drew Clark, director of sales at Lenovo partner Huber & Associates.

Lenovo is turning up the heat on its as-a-service competitors Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, by launching a new High-Performance Computing as-a-service offering as part of its expanding TruScale portfolio.

“Although GreenLake and Apex are similar offerings in the market, we continue to see Lenovo being a channel-first company that is light years ahead of Dell and HPE when it comes to true partnership,” said Drew Clark, director of sales at Huber & Associates, a Jefferson City, Mo.-based Lenovo partner. “Because of this, Lenovo’s go-to-market approach is the right decision based on the technology, based on its impact to our customers, and based on its total opportunity for us in the market.”

Lenovo’s new TruScale High-Performance Computing (HPC) as-a-service solution aims to empower customers to rapidly access supercomputing capabilities on-premises in an as-a-service experience.

“In the future, this as-a-service approach will make it easier to sell HPC,” said Clark.

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TruScale HPC as-a-service maximizes high-performance computing cluster resources and controls access through a pay-per-use model that is managed and supported by Lenovo and channel partners. Customers pay for what they consume, easily scale HPC clusters by removing resource limitations and can run applications at scale while managing budgets and billing through Lenovo’s TruScale Portal.

In late 2020, HPE unveiled its GreenLake HPC as-a-service offering that allows customers and partners to order HPC as-a-service through a self-service portal. HPE said the HPC GreenLake offering speeds up the deployment of HPC rollouts by 75 percent.

Dell Technologies Apex as-a-service portfolio does include HPC as-a-service via its Apex Custom Solutions offering, designed to help accelerate the time to discovery and innovation. This month, the company also launched several new Dell Apex solutions including Apex Backup Services for secure cloud data protection.

Lenovo said its TruScale on-premises HPC capability provides protected access to data without any changes to job scripts, or potential risks associated with public cloud exposure. With technology that is installed right at the customer data center, HPC workload managers can access and provision resources on-demand. Additional cluster resources can be obtained through a “push-button” access, which Lenovo says allows businesses to utilize additional computing, storage and acceleration capabilities as needed.

Huber & Associates’ Clark said he’s excited about the opportunities ahead with TruScale as Lenovo injects all aspects of its portfolio—from laptops and desktops to data center infrastructure—into TruScale which will bolster the company’s ‘One Lenovo’ vision.

“This marries with their ‘One Lenovo’ vision which we absolutely support. Our customers have never perceived a separation between their businesses and having true alignment across the board will make it even easier to do business in partnership with Lenovo,” said Clark.

In an interview last November with CRN, Lenovo’s Vladimir Rozanovich said he has plans to elevate Lenovo from a $60 billion PC company to a $100 billion end-to-end infrastructure, devices and PC as-a-service leader by taking share from competitors as the company’s One Lenovo vision takes shape.

Rozanovich, a 24-year AMD veteran who became Lenovo’s North America president, said he’s going to fight to win more North American market share from the likes of Dell and HPE in PCs, data center infrastructure and emerging as-a-service markets.

“I came to Lenovo because of what we’re actually implementing right now, which is our One Lenovo or Lenovo 360 plan. If I was just going to come here to be the head of the PC products where its, ‘Hey, Lenovo is No. 1 in PC worldwide and we’re No. 3 in North America, but we want to make sure that we get from No. 3 to No. 2,’— I mean, that’s exciting, but it’s not as exciting as saying, ‘Hey, Lenovo is not just a PC company. It’s a complete enterprise, small business and consumer organization that is going to service IT needs across a broad spectrum—from PCs, to phones, to tablets, to networks, to data center, to services and software, and supporting complex solutions—that’s why I’m here,” said Rozanovich, Lenovo’s North America President. “That’s the part where I was like, ‘Wow, this is exactly where I want to be in my career: trying to transform a $60 billion company up to $100 billion company.’”

The Hong Kong-based PC global market share leader and data center infrastructure specialist is one of the world’s largest HPC providers. Lenovo is working closely with industry partners to develop, integrate and deploy the technologies that deliver “exascale-level computing” to organizations of all sizes, the company said.

“Lenovo TruScale HPC as a Service allows for incredible innovation with the flexibility for HPC customers to expand their clusters when needed,” said Scott Tease, vice president and general manager of HPC at Lenovo, in a statement. “We designed this offering to make high performance computing resources easier and faster to deploy, offering researchers the freedom to think bigger and without technology being a barrier to their success.”