Lenovo and VMware Team Up to Build Software-Defined Data Center Offerings

In October 2014, Lenovo and VMware made an announcement unveiling their official partnership at the VMworld Europe 2014 conference in Barcelona, Spain. As Lenovo’s first announcement since their acquisition of the IBM x86 server business for $2.1 billion, this partnership with VMware will extend a 16-year development relationship between VMware and IBM’s System x business. With this partnership, both Lenovo and VMware will focus on software-defined data center (SDDC) offerings and solutions for cloud and end-user computing environments, specifically around servers including the Lenovo ThinkServer line, storage, networking, and virtualization.

Designed to help enterprises and service providers grasp the concept of software-defined data centers, the IT infrastructure solutions that VMware and Lenovo will develop will help users leverage server, storage, and network virtualization while simplifying resources, reducing IT costs, and improving the provisioning of applications. This will combine Lenovo’s expanded IT hardware capabilities with VMware’s virtualization technology in a wide range of areas.

Cloud offerings will include complete architectures from Lenovo’s networking and server hardware with VMware’s vRealize Suite of cloud automated management offerings such as hybrid and private cloud solutions. To provide network virtualization, VMware’s NSX software-defined networking (SDN) platform will be brought together with Lenovo’s top-of-rack networking technology for a solution around network virtualization gateways and integrated traffic management. Lenovo and VMware will also provide software-defined storage infrastructure offerings that are based on Lenovo server and VMware’s Virtual SAN software as well as virtual desktop services that combine the VMware Horizon virtual desktop infrastructure platform with Lenovo’s eXFlash server-based storage product.