Contemplating Consolidating Your IT Infrastructure? Lenovo’s ThinkAgile MX Azure Stack HCI Solutions Are Here

Many enterprises continue to face the ongoing challenge of expanding their IT infrastructure to accommodate their data growth. A majority of these enterprises use a three-tier architecture with separate compute, network and storage components. Managing these IT silos is not only complex, but also expensive, and in many cases, specialized skills are needed to deploy, maintain and administer. Many businesses are looking at a variety of different alternatives to solve these IT challenges. Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) provides one alternative for organizations to modernize their on-premise infrastructure. By consolidating compute and storage infrastructure and operations, HCI reduces footprint and simplifies management. Other benefits of HCI include flexibility to run mixed workloads, easier scalability and reduced TCO. Additionally, HCI solutions all have hybrid cloud capability allowing organizations to incorporate them into their overall cloud strategy.

Lenovo is a leading provider of hyperconverged solutions and partners with many of the premier software providers including Microsoft, Nutanix, VMware and others to provide customers choice when it comes to selecting infrastructure to solve their IT needs. As part of the long-standing partnership with Microsoft, Lenovo is announcing its new ThinkAgile MX Certified Nodes for Azure Stack HCI, aligned with Microsoft’s recent launch of Azure Stack HCI.

Azure Stack HCI solutions are suited for customers who want to run virtualized applications on modern infrastructure and reap all the benefits of hyperconvergence. Azure Stack HCI features the same software-defined compute, storage and networking software as the Microsoft Azure Stack cloud solution, and can integrate with Azure services for hybrid capabilities such as cloud-based backup, site-recovery, monitoring and more.

Lenovo is one of only two vendors to offer HCI nodes that come bundled with hardware, software and support. With deployment services and ThinkAgile advantage support, Lenovo ThinkAgile MX nodes are easy to install, deploy and maintain, making it simple for IT admins to migrate their workloads and manage them throughout the lifecycle of the product. ThinkAgile MX nodes include support for the latest hardware technologies such as NVMe drives, persistent memory and remote-direct-memory-access (RDMA) networking.

Another of the exciting features of Azure Stack HCI is the Windows Admin Center, which allows for integration into Azure services. The Lenovo XClarity plug-in leads the way in Windows Admin Center integration and enables an even more robust management experience. Lenovo offers customers the widest range of options on the Azure Stack HCI catalog and makes Lenovo one of the leading OEM partners offering this Microsoft solution. Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Azure Stack HCI solutions are available for purchase and through Lenovo TruScale, a subscription-based offering that allows customers to use and pay for data center hardware and services – on-premise or at a customer-preferred location – without having to purchase the equipment.

Organizations wanting to reduce the complexity of their IT operations should consider implementing HCI solutions.

By migrating to HCI, organizations can consolidate compute and storage workloads in a flexible and scalable manner, expanding their infrastructure as business dictates. For organizations wanting the benefits of Microsoft Azure Stack HCI and the reliability of Lenovo, the new Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Azure Stack HCI solutions may be the right fit.

Want to learn more? Check out the solution brief here.