Lenovo delivers AI to the edge, expanding the ThinkEdge portfolio
Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) has announced the expansion of the Lenovo ThinkEdge portfolio.
The company has introduced the new ThinkEdge SE450 server, which delivers an AI platform directly at the edge. Lenovo says the ThinkEdge SE450 advances intelligent edge capabilities with best-in-class, AI-ready technology to provide faster insights and computing performance to more environments for real-time decision-making at the edge.
"To better address challenges and capture competitive advantage from today's Smart Normal, businesses must be able to harness real-time AI insights directly at the edge-sites," says Lenovo ISG president, APAC, Sumir Bhatia.
"With speed and agility being top-of-mind, we're developing powerful, secure, and flexible solutions that reduce response time to market and increase value to customers. We have designed the ThinkEdge SE450 server to minimise business complexities and enhance compute power in remote locations with a wide variety of workloads.
"Whether it's real-time patient monitoring or diagnoses, in healthcare, or efficient traffic management systems in smart cities or predictive maintenance on the manufacturing line, we're delivering on our promise of AI at the edge," he says.
Accelerate business insights at the edge
Lenovo believes edge computing is at the heart of digital transformation for many industries. Research from Gartner estimates that 75% of enterprise-generated data will be processed at the edge by 2025, and 80% of enterprise IoT projects will incorporate AI by 2022.
"Expanding our cloud to on-premise enables faster data processing while adding resiliency, performance and enhanced user experiences," says Etisalat vice president, Fixed and Mobile Core, Khaled Al Suwaidi.
"As an early testing partner, our current deployment of Lenovo's ThinkEdge SE450 server is hosting a 5G network delivered on edge sites and introducing new edge applications to enterprises. It gives us a compact, ruggedised platform with the necessary performance to host our telecom infrastructure and deliver applications, such as e-learning, to users."
Enhance performance, scalability and security
Lenovo's ThinkEdge SE450 meets the demands of a wide variety of critical workloads with what the company calls a quieter go-anywhere form factor, featuring a shorter depth that allows it to be easily installed in space-constrained locations. The GPU-rich server is purpose-built to meet the requirements of vertically specific edge environments, with a ruggedised design that withstands a wider operating temperature, as well as high dust, shock and vibration for harsh settings.
As one of the first NVIDIA-Certified Edge systems, Lenovo's ThinkEdge SE450 uses NVIDIA GPUs for enterprise and industrial AI at the edge applications.
The ThinkEdge portfolio provides a variety of connectivity and security options that are easily deployed and more securely managed in today's remote environments, including a new locking bezel to help prevent unauthorised access and robust security features to better protect data.
The ThinkEdge SE450 is built on the latest 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor with Intel Deep Learning Boost technologies, featuring all-flash storage for running AI and analytics at the edge. Intel has verified it as an Intel Select Solution for vRAN.
"Our collaboration with Lenovo helps enterprises across many sectors drive business value through network transformation and edge computing," says Intel vice president and general manager, Network - Edge Platforms Division, Jeni Panhorst.
"Resilient and flexible edge servers built with 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors provide enhanced performance enabling the delivery of innovative AI-driven services where customers will expect them."
Edge site locations are often remotely controlled and hard to reach, so the ThinkEdge SE450 is automatically installed and managed with Lenovo Open Cloud Automation (LOC-A) and configurable with Lenovo XClarity Orchestrator software. Remote access to the server, via completely out-of-band wired or wireless access, avoids any unnecessary trip to the edge locations.
