Lenovo pulls back duvet – oh em gee, it's Maxta

Duo pair up to conquer Jade kingdom's hyper-converged appliance market

China's Lenovo has picked Maxta software to build a hybrid flash/disk hyper-converged infrastructure appliance (HCIA) for the Chinese market.

Maxta and Lenovo have a strategic partnership and have developed the appliance over "many months of joint development and customization to meet the needs of [Chinese] customers."

The AIO-H3000 integrates a Lenovo server, either an RD or an SX series, with a Xeon V3 processor, disk drives, Intel DC Series SSDs, Maxta's MxSP (Maxta Storage Platform) software, and a VMware or KVM hypervisor. It will be sold inside greater China with, of course, a Chinese-language-based GUI. We understand Broadcom is contributing technology as well.

The Maxta MxSP software "enables the tuning of the virtual storage pool to the optimal configuration for a variety of workloads concurrently, including VDI, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server and Oracle Database."

Chinese language (mostly) GUI

Lenovo's sales force and channel will do the selling, with Lenovo saying it "will devote significant resources to market, sell and support [the] AIO-H3000." It wants to dominate the Chinese market by responding to what it calls its unique requirements.

Lenovo RD Server configuration details. Click for larger version

WeiDong Wei, VP and GM for Lenovo Enterprise Cloud Ecosystem and Cloud Infrastructure Services, said: "The Chinese marketplace is growing exponentially, putting a great strain on IT budgets, and presenting a huge opportunity for IT infrastructure transformation for both Lenovo and Maxta."

Lenovo SX Server configuration details. Click for larger version

Maxta CEO Yoram Novick says the appliance will help Chinese customers "reduce the complexity and cost of their data centers."

Maxta and Lenovo already deliver a set of preconfigured MaxDeploy hyper-converged appliances worldwide, and Maxta supplies hyper-converged product to Lenovo subsidiary Motorola Mobility for use internally.

Lenovo ThinkServer RD Series enclosure

For Maxta this is a significant deal, in a month which has already seen Cisco enter the HCIA market with a SpringPath software OEM deal, HPE introduce a ROBO/departmental HC 380 product, and EMC introducing its VxRAIL product in February. The HCIA wars are hotting up and Maxta has more skin in the game. ®