Lenovo Group Ltd. today announced a slate of new advisory services for customers that need help with their digital transformations.

The new services were introduced alongside a number of updates to the company’s hyperconverged infrastructure platforms.

Among the consulting services are Principal Consultant-led workshops, which Lenovo described as collaborative “white boarding sessions” that will help an organization’s applications and platforms teams decide what their options are. The workshops will cover topics such as SQL Server 2019 migration and Microsoft Azure migration.

Lenovo will also lend its consulting expertise to services such as VMware Cloud Foundation Design and Deployment, Hybrid Cloud Assessment, Hybrid Cloud Azure Migration Design Services and Hybrid Cloud Implementation Services, it said.

In addition to the advisory services, Lenovo announced a new addition to its family of hyperconverged infrastructure systems, and some updates to its existing models. HCI platforms are software-defined, unified systems that combine the basic elements of traditional data centers, with storage, compute, networking and management all bundled into a single appliance. The idea with hyperconverged infrastructure is that it reduces data center complexity while also boosting scalability.

Lenovo’s new HCI systems include a new SAP HANA Certified ThinkAgile VX platform aimed at customers that need to run very large SAP HANA databases on-premises. The ThinkAgile VX7820 8-socket system, as it’s known, has twice as many processors and direct-connect NVMe as previous systems, and up to five times faster load times, Lenovo said. That means customers can increase both the size and quantity of virtual machines running SAP workloads.

In addition to the new platform, Lenovo said all of its ThinkAgile VX HCI systems are getting a software upgrade that will deliver management improvements such as 75% faster cluster deployments and simplified lifecycle management via VMware Inc.’s vSphere Lifecycle Manager.

Lenovo said its existing ThinkAgile HX1021 HCR platform for edge deployments is getting a security update too, with the addition of Lenovo ThinkShield Security providing intrusion detection and tamper protection capabilities. Finally, Lenovo said its ThinkAgile MX series HCR platforms that are designed for running Azure Stack software and services can now be purchased easily via the Lenovo Cloud Marketplace through an as-a-service model.

Photo: lenovophotolibrary/Flickr