Lenovo’s Blockbuster Plan To Acquire Infinidat: 7 Things To Know
‘From our compute side, we scale from everywhere from small edge systems all the way up to multi-GPU systems. But we did not have a solution in the high-performance block analytics storage space to match with our compute and to complement all the rest of the storage we have today. This is an investment in our IP to deliver complete, differentiated solutions for customers. It complements everything we do today in the portfolio,’ says Stuart McRae, executive director and general manager for Lenovo’s storage division.
Lenovo’s planned acquisition of Infinidat, when it closes as expected sometime this year, changes all that.
Infinidat will bring Lenovo not just one of the storage industry’s highest performance storage technologies, but also technology aimed at making data readily available for use in AI workloads.
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That technology will make Lenovo a much stronger data center competitor, said Stuart McRae, executive director and general manager for Lenovo’s storage division.
“From our compute side, we scale from everywhere from small edge systems all the way up to multi-GPU systems,” McRae told CRN. “But we did not have a solution in the high-performance block analytics storage space to match with our compute and to complement all the rest of the storage we have today. This is an investment in our IP to deliver complete, differentiated solutions for customers.”
The acquisition will make Lenovo a top storage technology developer across the gamut of high-end enterprise storage, said Infinidat CMO Eric Herzog.
“Infinidat is a high-end storage play, but it’s anything in the high-end storage space, from primary storage, secondary storage, backup, disaster recovery,” Herzog told CRN. “As long as it’s high-end storage, we fit in that space.”
Neither McRae nor Herzog would discuss details such as the purchase price of the acquisition or how the deal was made. But they did address multiple issues related to what could be one of the key storage acquisitions for 2025.
For more about why this is such an important acquisition for both Lenovo and Infinidat, read more from CRN’s conversation with McRae and Herzog, which has been edited for clarity.
The Significance Of The Acquisition
Infinidat is the first significant acquisition by Lenovo’s ISG since the company acquired IBM’s X-series server business, McRae said
“We think it's great for our customers,” he said. “It's great for Infinidat customers. It brings them in with the scope and scale of Lenovo, which is one of the top infrastructure providers in the world and a top 10 supply chain company worldwide with distribution across over 160 countries. And it fits a gap for us as we build our business. From our compute side, we scale from everywhere from small edge systems all the way up to multi-GPU systems. But we did not have a solution in the high-performance block analytics storage space to match with our compute and to complement all the rest of the storage we have today. This is an investment in our IP to deliver complete, differentiated solutions for customers. It complements everything we do today in the portfolio, and all of our strategic partnerships in place remain unchanged.”
Overcomes A Mixed History Of Storage At Lenovo
When Lenovo acquired IBM’s X-series server business, it did not receive any of IBM’s storage technology. Instead, Lenovo tried to build its storage business via strategic deals. Starting in 2012, Lenovo resold storage from EMC, a relationship that lasted until 2015 when Lenovo made a move to build its own storage business independent of EMC. Lenovo arch-rival Dell acquired EMC in 2016.
Lenovo later had two very short-lived storage technology partnerships. In 2015, Lenovo and SimpliVity struck a deal that will allow the Chinese hardware giant to offer hyper-converged solutions on its System X infrastructure. In 2016, Lenovo launched a converged infrastructure offering using technology from Nimble Storage. Lenovo arch-rival Hewlett Packard Enterprise acquired SimpliVity in early 2017. A few months later, HPE acquired Nimble Storage. Lenovo eventually replaced those alliances with another that was based on DataCore’s software-defined storage. The company also moved to solidify a relationship with VMware’s software-defined storage technology.
Lenovo in 2018 formed a global partnership with NetApp. That relationship, McRae said, got Lenovo into the midrange and enterprise storage business with unified block, file, and object storage technology. That relationship continues via a joint venture aimed at the Chinese market and via a licensing agreement for the rest of the world, he said.
“When you look at our existing business today, it's really built around traditional arrays,” he said. “We also have some scale-out partnerships for high performance file and HPC storage with like Scale [Computing] and DDN. And then there’s our hyperconverged space with [VMware] VSAN and Nutanix environments.”
Makes Lenovo More Competitive
Infinidat will give Lenovo a major boost in competitiveness against such rivals as Dell and HPE, McRae said.
“Compared to a lot of storage companies, we’ll have a super broad portfolio,” he said. “Maybe not compared to Dell and HPE, but to the pure-play storage companies. We have a really diverse product to fit across multiple use cases, in enterprises and outside of enterprises. One thing we didn't have was a really high performance, highly available, highly secure block storage for the 100-percent uptime, cyber secure, enterprise analytics space. So this acquisition really brings us around and fills that out, and doesn't change anything we're doing in the other areas. It's very complimentary to everything we're doing today.”
Why Infinidat Decided To Be Acquired
Infinidat plays in the high end of a very tough storage market, serving enterprises including the Fortune 50 businesses via a global network of distributors and channel partners, Herzog said.
While Infinidat sells hardware, it is essentially a software developer, he said.
“Lenovo offers their power of supply chain,” he said. “We’re very, very software centric. We use just off the shelf components, and Lenovo has an incredible hardware team. So how that can complement us and deliver better solutions for our end users and our channel partners was hugely attractive to us. Those combined with an opportunity for us to get involved with a publicly traded company.”
Lenovo also offered the advantage of having a strong entry and midrange storage business but not an enterprise storage business, which meant Infinidat’s technology will not conflict with Lenovo’s existing offerings, Herzog said.
“All that combined basically gave us an incredible opportunity with the extensive global capabilities of Lenovo to expand the value we delivered to existing customers and to the service provider market,” he said. “We're very, very strong with the midsize and small service providers globally. So this made a lot of sense to fill a gap in Lenovo’s portfolio and allow us a huge level of expansion with existing and new customers. Lenovo has a bunch of customers that could use high end storage, but it didn’t have an offering.”
The acquisition of Infinidat also complements Lenovo’s server business, Herzog said.
“Lenovo has a very strong portfolio in the AI space, and Infinidat offers things like an AI RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) solution,” he said. “Then there’s what Lenovo does with standard high-end servers. So between the AI side and high-end servers, we filled a huge gap for them. So this allows Lenovo to expand with existing customers that they couldn't sell high-end storage to but now will be able to do with what Infinidat does.”
Increases Lenovo’s Credibility
The acquisition brings more credibility to Lenovo, McRae said.
“For customers who are making a decision and want to have a partner to deliver end-to-end, this builds credibility and gets us into more conversations with enterprise customers,” he said. “We’ve grown our business from entry to midrange, and that’s great for some segments, but enterprises are looking to buy my high-end and my midrange from the same provider. So this gives us a good opportunity to build that credibility with more enterprise customers with what Infinidat brings.”
Lenovo has business in over 160 countries worldwide, McRae said. “We have a really broad coverage of customers, and some of those customers in some developing markets are growing to absolutely need this kind of level of storage,” he said.
Increases Lenovo’s Data Protection Capabilities
One thing often overlooked is Infinidat’s strength in high-end data protection between the InfiniGuard purpose-built backup clients, which Lenovo doesn't currently have, and the InfiniBox hybrid backup-as-a-target device, Herzog said.
“We do exceedingly well partnering with Veeam, Commvault, Veritas, IBM Storage Protect, all the major backup vendors,” he said. “That expands the business beyond high-end primary storage. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention our incredible high-end play, at least on the cyber storage integration side. InfiniSafe Automated Cyber Protection talks to things like Microsoft, Sentinel, IBM, QRadar. That's unique. And there’s what we've done with our InfiniSafe Cyber Detection technology. Infinidat is a high-end storage play, but it's anything in the high-end storage space, from primary storage, secondary storage, backup, disaster recovery. As long as it's high-end storage, we fit in that space.”
Acquiring Infinidat Vs. Partnering With Infinidat
Lenovo currently works with a wide range of technology partners, and its own technology supports storage offerings from multiple vendors including competitors like Dell and HPE, McRae said.
“We would not call that a technical alliance, but we work in a mixed, heterogeneous environments for both on the server side and the storage side,” he said. “We think we work better together. We think there's always a value for someone who wants to buy all of their infrastructure from one provider, whether it's a reference architecture or a validated design and solution that we've done with the end to end support that we provide today. Never say never, but we're not going to be a closed provider. We have to work in a heterogeneous environment.”
That said, Lenovo decided to acquire Infinidat rather than partner with the company, McRae said.
“There's always value in owning the IP and being able to innovate and differentiate, both from the customer and the partner sides,” he said. “As I said earlier, some customers want to have everything from one provider. I think the same is true for a lot of partners. There are a lot of what I'll call ‘high value partners’ today that sell our midrange storage who may also want something that scales up to the high-performance space. And so part of our growth plan is to provide that to our partners. If a partner wants to invest with us, they want to invest across the board. So bringing that scale is really important.”