5 Things Partners Need To Know About Lenovo's ThinkAgile SX For Microsoft Azure Stack

Lenovo Embracing Azure Stack

Now that major IT vendors have jumped into the Microsoft Azure Stack game, they're busy trying to one-up each other.

Lenovo embraced the Microsoft Azure Stack early as a way to market the simplicity, flexibility, scalability and capacity of on-premises cloud solutions. Top data center vendors such as Dell EMC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise also have begun selling Azure Stack and recently have started trying to differentiate their offerings.

Now Lenovo says it has landed an important endorsement for its Azure Stack offering from Intel.

Lenovo, which says it does nearly 90 percent of its North America business through the channel, released its ThinkAgile SX for Microsoft Azure Stack as part of its plug-and-play ThinkAgile line of software-defined data center offerings launched last summer. The system carries no up-front cloud software license costs, and customers are billed monthly based on usage.

Here are five things partners need to know about the latest developments in Lenovo's ThinkAgile SX for Microsoft Azure Stack efforts.

Early Adopter

Lenovo said it was the first major IT vendor to demo Microsoft Azure Stack at the Microsoft Ignite conference last year. Lenovo unveiled ThinkAgile for Microsoft Azure last June and said it was the first OEM to deploy production-ready Azure stack offerings. The company said it has seen good traction with the turnkey, hybrid offerings and that customers see greater performance, security and flexibility than they would with legacy systems.

New Process

Later this year, the ThinkAgile SX for Microsoft Azure Stack will begin supporting new Intel Xeon Scalable processors. The new processors will boost performance, increase memory and bandwidth and increase virtual machine density, Lenovo said. The new processors are being dropped into an infrastructure that Lenovo said is tops in reliability, customer satisfaction and performance.

Select Company

Intel is making the ThinkAgile SX its first "Select Solution" for Microsoft Azure Stack. The designation signals that solutions are tested, verified optimized and tuned in order to simplify deployment.

Support System

The ThinkAgile SX is supported by Lenovo's ThinkAgile Advantage program, which includes deployment, configuration and training. Customers also get the ability to communicate directly with Lenovo ThinkAgile support technicians for troubleshooting. Lenovo said its technicians are available for customers throughout the entire support process.

Hitting The Accelerator

Lenovo said the "Select Solution" for Azure Stack helps organizations deploy and utilize hybrid cloud infrastructure more quickly.

"Data center digital transformation is an ongoing challenge," said Lenovo in a blog about the designation. "Many data center managers and administrators struggle with complex and inflexible environments that are limited in scalability, capacity, and performance. They are often left to fight issues that do not allow them to be strategic with time and resources to help support business transformation initiatives and new business opportunities."