Today Lenovo and NetApp announced a fascinating collaboration and joint venture. The essence of which is that there will be Lenovo manufactured storage appliances running NetApp software and technology. Beyond that announcement, the joint venture in China will allow the companies to sell new products tailored to the Chinese market.
Lenovo and NetApp DE Series
The Lenovo DE series arrays are the mid-range arrays from the company. There are two array types the “F” for the all-flash array series and the H for the “hybrid” disk and flash arrays.
Here are the quick specs on the two AFA Lenovo and NetApp DE series machines, you can see that the DE6000F is the higher-end model.
For the hybrid arrays, the new DE series has three models that can accept 2.5″ and 3.5″ drives. This allows for both hard drives and flash to be used in the same systems.
It is quite amazing to see these systems with such low RAM levels. It shows how the storage market has diverged from the virtualization market over many years in terms of common hardware points.
Lenovo and NetApp DM Series
The higher-end solution is the Lenovo DM series of arrays. These are meant to scale to tens of petabytes in large clusters using NetApp ONTAP 9.4 (or later) operating systems.
Here are the Lenovo ThinkSystem DM all-flash arrays powered by NetApp ONTAP.
These also have hybrid capabilities denoted by a “H” in the model name:
Overall, these are much larger systems and it is fascinating that we are seeing Lenovo adopt NetApp. Perhaps it is more fascinating to see the reverse since NetApp already can produce systems and has been doing so for many years. Lenovo likely gives them an additional channel.
Lenovo and Netapp DM and DE Series Availability
Both the Lenovo ThinkSystem DE and DM product lines are available for purchase globally as of today.
Lenovo and NetApp Joint Venture in China
This was not part of the product announcements, but the two companies are collaborating in China to provide solutions starting in 2019. Here is an excerpt on the JV we received from Lenovo:
Additionally, Lenovo and NetApp announced a new joint venture company in China to deliver storage products and data management solutions localized and tailored to meet China’s specialized requirements and distinct cloud ecosystem. The new venture is expected to be operational by spring 2019, pending local approvals.
