4 New Solutions For Lenovo’s TruScale Infrastructure Services Platform

While Lenovo is broadening out its TruScale offering into an ‘everything-as-a-service’ platform, the company also announced new infrastructure solutions for TruScale from Microsoft Azure, VMware, Intel and Deloitte.

New For TruScale

Along with announcing the expansion of its TruScale infrastructure services into an “everything-as-a-service” model, Lenovo has also disclosed new solutions for the platform built in partnership with several of the biggest players in the tech industry. Announced last week at Lenovo Tech World 2021, the new offerings include solutions built with VMware, Microsoft Azure, Intel and Deloitte. The offerings are related to the infrastructure-as-a-service side of TruScale—even as the platform has now also been expanded to include solutions outside of data center infrastructure, such as device-as-a-service.

In remarks at the virtual Tech World 2021 event, Lenovo CEO Yuanqing Yang said Lenovo is expanding its TruScale offering as “more enterprise and SMB customers are adopting device-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service. They are choosing the IT infrastructure and the services that are easy to scale up and scale out.”

The new solutions for TruScale follow the debut of Lenovo TruScale for Hosted Desktops with Nutanix in April. The remote work solution brings together Lenovo client devices, virtual desktop environments from providers such as Citrix and Lenovo’s ThinkAgile HX Series hyperconverged system running Nutanix software.

What follows are the key details on four new solutions for Lenovo’s TruScale infrastructure services platform built in partnership with VMware, Microsoft Azure, Intel and Deloitte.

VMware Edge Cloud Solution

Lenovo is the “first OEM in the market with VMware’s edge cloud software solution,” which runs on Lenovo’s ThinkSystem SE350 edge server, Lenovo Executive Vice President Kirk Skaugen said during remarks at Tech World 2021. “This enhancement to our resilient edge portfolio extends cloud capabilities, delivers the insights and benefits directly to the edge location and minimizes the external networking components required at the edge.”

The solution involves running VMware edge cloud software—vSphere, vSAN and optional Tanzu and SD-WAN—on two ThinkSystem SE350 servers that are optimized for deployments at the edge, Lenovo said. The compact-sized ThinkSystem SE350 offers features a range of connectivity options (WiFi/LTE/1- or 25-Gigabit Ethernet); durability features (resistance to shock/vibration, dust, extreme temperature, humidity); and security capabilities such as encryption and tamper resistance.

In remarks at Tech World last week, VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram said that like Lenovo, his company is seeking to help enable “this major shift we’ve been seeing to everything as a service. At VMware, we are on a very similar path [as Lenovo]. It’s how our customers want and expect to consume software today.”

As part of this journey, “our strategic partnership with Lenovo is critical,” Raghuram said. “When we combine Lenovo’s TruScale and VMware’s cloud services, extending from the data center to the edge to the cloud, our vision—and more importantly our customers’ vision to transform—is realized. As the next step in our partnership, VMware is committed to working with Lenovo on joint as-a-service solutions.”

Microsoft Azure Stack HCI Hybrid Cloud Solution

Another new TruScale solution announced last week is an offering built with the help of Microsoft and its Azure Stack HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure) operating system. With the solution, Lenovo is making available a managed hybrid cloud infrastructure-as-a-service offering aimed at edge computing deployments. The TruScale solution combines Lenovo’s ThinkAgile MX HCI platform with Microsoft’s Azure Stack HCI software, Lenovo said.

In remarks at the virtual Lenovo Tech World event on Wednesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the new TruScale solution “offers a single billing model for data center subscriptions,” among other benefits.

“Customers increasingly value agility and predictability through [an] as-a-service model,” Nadella said. “So that’s why I’m excited about how we’re partnering on [Lenovo’s] services-led transformation. In particular, it’s great to see the work [Lenovo is] doing to provide customers a complete as-a-service model for hybrid cloud deployments, building an integrated, end-to-end Azure Stack HCI system.”

Intel Silicon-as-a-Service

In partnership with Intel, Lenovo disclosed it plans to make available a TruScale silicon-as-a-service solution. The offering allows customers to only pay for what they use in terms of compute resources, eliminating issues with over-paying, Skaugen said during remarks at Tech World 2021.

“This is an enablement for customers to be able to scale compute resources on demand, and pay for only activated processor cores,” said Vlad Rozanovich, president of Lenovo’s North America business, in an interview with CRN. “That is something that we have heard from customers previously – ‘if I’m not using a core, I don’t want to pay for it.’”

The silicon-as-a-service offering with Intel offers zero-touch provisioning and remote configuration of compute resources anytime using Lenovo’s XClarity systems management software, Lenovo said. The solution is “ideal” for businesses that are seeing strong growth and have a need for pre-provisioned resources in order to support dynamic scaling, according to the company.

“I applaud Lenovo for upending traditional business models with as-a-service offerings such as Lenovo TruScale, and collaborating to drive the innovation our customers need,” Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said in remarks at Tech World. “This partnership between Intel and Lenovo can make critical technology accessible to more people, and allow companies to dynamically scale their business-critical services—and stay ahead of evolving business needs.”

TruScale IaaS with Deloitte OpenCloud Solution

At Tech World 2021, Lenovo also announced that its TruScale infrastructure-as-a-service solution has been integrated with Deloitte’s OpenCloud Management Platform. The solution provides a fully managed, on-premises private cloud solution that “can be seamlessly managed” across a customer’s multi-cloud environment, Lenovo said.

The Deloitte OpenCloud Management Platform serves as a single, consistent platform for managing a customer’s entire multi-cloud environment, while TruScale provides an as-a-service private cloud solution that is fully managed, Lenovo said.

In remarks at Tech World, Deloitte Global CEO Punit Renjen said that “leveraging the unique strengths of Lenovo and Deloitte, companies can implement hybrid cloud systems that support their strategic and technical business objectives.”

“It’s a service that makes use of Lenovo’s strength in hardware and Deloitte’s experience in hybrid cloud operations,” he said. “[The] Lenovo as-a-service approach helps meet the market’s demand for responsible, responsive, reliable hybrid cloud operations.”