It’s no secret that China’s Lenovo Group Ltd. has its sights set on becoming a major player in the data center. That became apparent when the company bought out IBM’s x86 server business last year in a XXXX deal. Now, in advance of its much anticipated Lenovo TechWorld event later this week, the company has announced a massive expansion of its portfolio of IT services, with new software-defined storage (SDS) services, high-performance servers and improved hyperconverged appliances among the highlights.

In addition, Lenovo said it’s developed a new and improved version of its network operating system (NOS).

Lenovo’s newly expanded portfolio drives the company “deeper into next generation IT and strengthens the company’s ability to help customers transform their data centers by embracing emerging data consumption and delivery models such as cloud-based infrastructure, big data and analytics,” it said in a statement yesterday.

In particular, the new Lenovo Cloud NOS will become a core element of the firm’s approach as it works to help organizations build and manage their own software-defined data centers, said Radhika Krishnan, executive director and general manager for converged infrastructure and networking in the Lenovo Data Center Group, in an interview with IT Business Edge. She adds that the reason Lenovo built its own NOS in the first place is because those kinds of environments demand a networking architecture that can scale up to support thousands of systems. Now, Lenovo is offering NOS for customers to deploy atop of data center switches from more established vendors like Juniper Networks Inc., a partner of the company.

As well, Lenovo also unveiled a new family of 12Gb SANs which can be configured either as hybrid storage systems capable of supporting both Flash and traditional storage mediums, or all-Flash arrays. The company also formalized its alliances with Cloudian Inc. and Nexenta Systems Inc., which means their software-defined storage software will now be bundled with Lenovo’s appliances. With Nexenta’s software, Lenovo can add unified storage appliances that are able to support both block and file storage in all-flash, hybrid and magnetic storage configurations. Meanwhile, Cloudian’s software means Lenovo can now provide an object-based storage system.

On the server side, Lenovo said it’s refreshing its x3850 and x3950 X6 servers with support for Intel’s latest E7-4800 and E7-8800 v4 processors, which can provide up to 39 percent more performance than previous generation chips. The x3850 and x3950 X6 servers can be configured with a maximum of 12TB of memory, and sport a modular “compute book” design, which makes the systems easier to maintain and upgrade, the company said.

There’s also a new ThinkServer sd350, which is an ultra-dense, 2U four-node (2U4N) system optimized for data centers that require maximum processor density in confined spaces. Lenovo also showed off new 1u and 2u hyperconverged appliances developed in cooperation with Nutanix Inc., for the first time.

Today’s announcement shows Lenovo is really upping its game in the data center. Nonetheless, it still has some way to go before it can stand head and shoulders with leading vendors like Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Dell Inc., which will soon combine its monster portfolio with that of EMC Corp.’s. But even so, today’s announcements mean that Lenovo’s portfolio is now serious enough that its competitors will be forced to take note.

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