Lenovo gets into the on-premises cloud game with ThinkAgile CP

Lenovo has launched a new product line called ThinkAgile CP that consists of Lenovo ThinkSystem hardware and Cloudistics software for what it calls a “composable cloud,” or cloud-in-a-box, where the attributes of cloud multi-tenancy are available to organizations behind their firewall.

Basically it’s a hyperconverged system preconfigured to work right out of the box and operate inside a data center much like a cloud service provider. Compute, storage, and networking are designed to connect to the ThinkAgile CP Cloud Controller, which in turn lets an IT administrator spin up multi-tenant provisioning. Software-defined compute, storage, and networking can be achieved in just a few clicks.

The ThinkAgile CP Series features fully integrated high availability, backup, remote replication, usage metering, live help and support, and multi-layered, multi-tenant security. Its target market is midmarket and enterprise customers seeking to take advantage of agile development methodologies using a private cloud ecosystem rather than the public cloud.

ThinkAgile CP offers preconfigured, or curated offerings; organizations can also compose their own applications. For example, a new database development environment can be spun up with just a click, and a complete DevOps environment is created.

Cloudistics CEO Najaf Husain claims his company’s private cloud computing platform cuts down application deployment cycles by 90 percent, which translates to faster time to revenue.

“We make private clouds as easy to use as the public cloud but with the control and performance enterprise customers want. Our partnership with Lenovo enables us to unleash a next-generation composable cloud platform to the market that is easy to implement, deploy, operate, maintain and support,” he said in a statement.

Management of the ThinkAgile CP is performed through the Cloud Controller, a SaaS-based portal that allows admins to manage their ThinkAgile CP environment from anywhere.

What is a composable infrastructure?

What exactly is a “composable infrastructure?” It’s a term that has been used by HPE, Cisco Systems and Dell EMC. Each has their own definition of it, but Lenovo’s approach focuses on the cloud and application layer, with traditional hardware as the supporting infrastructure. 

There has been an effort for some time by the big hardware vendors to provide a cloud-like environment on-premises. Of course, they can’t duplication the flexibility of spinning up new hardware like Amazon and Microsoft, but they can offer many similarities on the software side. Rackspace and HPE have been particularly aggressive in this space, with Rackspace offering colo for burst capacity when needed.

Lenovo has been silent for too long and has lost ground to Dell, HPE, and white box vendors. It’s good to see them back in the game, and Cloudistics adds a nice twist that the other guys don’t have.