Keeping Up with Industry expectations

Lenovo, as a brand has a number of trust factors out in the market. Its association with IBM brand has created the correct space where it can lead from the front with path breaking technology in the industry of servers and datacenters. Siddhesh Naik, Director, Enterprise Business Group, India/South Asia shares some of the market firsts that Lenovo is ensuring, to provide a better server experience.

1. Lenovo is today one of the largest server brands globally. What trends do you see in your industry and how far are you planning to orchestrate the changes?

There are four primary trends in the server industry. The top most among them is the security. Security is the biggest concern for any CIO. Given the increase in security breaches that has happened in the recent past — high profile that  have serious implications on your reputation, multi-million dollar law suits, lack of customer loyalty, customer terminating your contracts, it also results in  down time. So security is by and large the top most concern.

The next biggest issue that defines the buying patterns for CIO is efficiency. Efficiency is an extremely critical factor because 79% of the money spent by a CIO is on running the data center and maintaining the data center power. The budgets allocated to CIOs is shrinking which makes it extremely difficult for the CIO to draw the line and the whole IT operation becomes a complex balancing act for them.

The third is around reliability. There are surveys that tell us that about a day of down time can cost 16.5 million dollars on an average for a large enterprise. It’s something on which your core business runs on, so any outage can lead you to be out of business for that particular period, with certain set of clients. So reliability is definitely one of the top most key parameters that CIO’s looks at.

The fourth, is an element which is very critical in today’s world — speed and agility. Now in a scenario where market trends are changing very rapidly- far more rapidly than what the IT team can anticipate, which is where speed and agility becomes very important. Let me give you an example, Lenovo’s phones A-7000 or A-6000(on e-market space) sells 40,000 units in a couple of seconds.  You need a backend infrastructure that can really cater to that huge traffic. It’s not about a monolithic investment, it’s about your infrastructure being  able to scale to a massive spike.

2.  What solutions does Lenovo offer for these issues?

From a security perspective, we are a major player in the security space. For example, the latest M-5 servers that we have launched, comes with self-encryption drives.  That’s a physical level security component we have introduced. On the efficiency front there are multiple elements – efficiency around components, server power supplies that comes with titanium power supply (at 96% efficiency).  This builds up the overall data center efficiency because with hundreds of such individual servers   efficiency then boils down to the cooling that you provide internally to the server. The technology in the systemix portfolio is a dual zone cooling, which lets you cool each zone depending on the thermal conditions within that zone and you have variable speed fans, redundant fans within each zone to ensure that the temperature is kept optimal. One more important element is operating temperature of the data center, all systemix servers are like wik online servers. That means that you can operate it between 5 degree centigrade and 40 degree centigrade. Even a few degree centigrade increase in your data center operating temperature would mean a significant saving around the cooling and significant improvement around your carbon foot printer. Those are some of our contribution towards the element of efficiency.

We have always been on top amongst reliability. IT-IR is one of the leading 3rd party consultants who does surveys around reliability, and XA6 systemix servers continues to be number one player in that space. This is our contribution on reliability front.

The last element is the speed and agility, our contribution to speed and agility is performance. We have servers with. almost 131 % performance increase over our last generation servers. On the speed and agility front, what really matters is your ability to pay as you grow. We have taken a modular pay as you grow approach, where you starting adding components. For example, you can move from a two-way to four-way to a six-way to an eight way. You actually start investing as your business grows. So those are the four elements in brief and our contribution towards it.

   3.   Lenovo and VMware, they have announced the plans to collaborate on software defined data center solutions. What is the strategy behind this? And how will it affect your market for data centers and Lenovo’s market? 

In October 2014, Lenovo and VMware announced a jointly collaborating strategy towards building software defined data centers. It basically means that we are extending compute side with virtualization and extending it on the network side, and extending it on to the storage side. It’s about building a complete software defined environment within the data center. In the typical networking approach every communication goes only through a pre-configured path. This means that there may be enough and more band width available but the pre-configured path is what is getting choked. Software defined networking would pull out the intelligence out of the switches and bring it on the top on a software layer– which then defines the part it needs to take.

These are elements that create agility, speed, and ability to churn out infrastructure according to your needs. It also gives you the ability to handle spikes. You also have an ability to move resources on to the billing application (in order to take care of spikes). We have to consider this as mainstream in the years to come. We definitely see this as a trend that is growing at a much faster pace.

4.  And how will it affect your market customers?

From our perspective, it’s giving us the technology lead with customers and I think we are able to address that in a very effective way. In the IBM days, while we had great technology, our ability to partner with lot of these software vendors (ISV) was limited because we were looked upon as a competition. Now, our ability to partner and drive a far more effective engagement on the ground is much better. I see the engagements moving forward on the software defined data center or on the cloud. We are much deeper engaged with the VM ware support.

5.  Apart from STDC, data center technologies have undergone some major changes in the last few years. What do you see the trend as, over 2015?

 Like I mentioned earlier, the CIO is facing reducing budgets and almost 79% of his budget is spent on running a data center. The whole point is about, how to optimize and how to start investing into new technologies that gives agility and speed to meet business requirements. Everything that’s happening around these trends revolves around these basic parameters. Some of the elements that are changing this is within the same energy envelope, how do I increase the performance. I need to know, how to get that performance within the same energy, how do I built in cooling efficiency, and how to get the required power requirements. Those are the elements that play a critical role. The typical data center norm in India has been around running at 22 degree centigrade. As an ambient operating temperature, even a few degrees centigrade on top of the 22 degree centigrade would mean significant saving of power consumption and efficiency.

We do complex high dense solutions, were you do a reorder heat exchanger. We have a super computer in Pune, it’s a one peta flop super computer that does weather forecasting for the country. It is a complete chilled water reorder heat exchanger cooled system. It’s about 84 servers running in a single rack – more than 30 + kilo watts in a single rack. We also got into a mode level water cooling, which means, you can have a pipe that runs through the mode instead of a heat sink — which access the heat sink that runs through the body of the server and cools it. This what IBM has been doing for years together in Mainframe. It’s a technology that we implement on XA6 platform. The typical POE in the Indian data centers is 1.4 or 1.5. This technology brings the POE down from 1.4-1.5 to 1.1 – which is a dramatic improvement in our data center energy efficiency.

6.  The cloud changed all the business equations, how does it affect your business?  

Everyone is talking about cloud, but, you have to rise above the clouds to see the sun shine. It’s been the story for last couple of years. Cloud is great when it comes to peripheral applications and cloud is awesome when it comes to smaller SMB business. Most large enterprises are implementing a private or hybrid cloud. From a Lenovo perspective, we play a big role as an infrastructure player in the private and hybrid cloud space. We work very closely with partners like IBM, VM ware, Microsoft and also some of the open source vendors in the cloud space. We provide deep level of integration with each of these on the ground. We provide technical services; we have lab service components in Bangalore. This helps to integrate with these cloud softwares. Lastly, the ability to really scale on the cloud set up.

7.  What is the channel strategy that you are implementing?

Channels have been core to our business. From a Lenovo perspective, almost 87% of their business has come through channels. EBG in India has been a similar story; almost 89% of our business comes through channels. If I look at the year that went by, we would have 1500 partners with whom we do business. It’s been a strong breadth and depth relationship with a top few set of partners. Our channel strategy has been built pillar to pillar and have been an integral part of our growth. We have more than doubled our revenue in the last 5 years. Practically that entire growth has come from our channel breadth.

8.  What is Green Data centers?

If you look at any of the data centers in the country they are all getting measured on their carbon foot prints. The real elements are the efficiency of the Data center, power and cooling. You have multiple limits within that data center. One is ability to consolidate in a big way. That can be done by providing servers with a significance performance. The memory expansion of a server is what defines the ability to consolidate it more and more. We have 1.5 TB memory on simple to socket server as well.

Your ability to consolidate more is going to be very significant. If you consider 8 GB per VM, you are going to talk about 190 applications getting consolidate on simple to socket server — that’s a phenomenal level of consolidation.  This is the first step towards a Green Data center because the moment you consolidate, your energy utilization is getting optimized — you are utilizing your existing server to the fullest.

You then run them at an optimal temperature. You get down to efficiency about various components such as power supply, fans (which give you a better efficiency) and each of these component efficiencies have a cascading effect because of multiple servers in the data center. Elements   around direct work cooling has a significant contribution towards building a green data center.