In a major move, Lenovo announced that it is buying Infinidat to broaden its enterprise storage portfolio. While it is nothing new for server vendors to purchase storage vendors, this one feels like a big deal for Lenovo.
Lenovo Buying Infinidat for Enterprise Storage
For those who do not know Infinidat, they are an Israeli-based storage vendor that focuses on enterprise block storage. The company’s primary products are its InfiniBox lines, which include all-flash offerings, as well as its InfiniGuard data protection product. Infinidat also has features to handle things like off-site asynchronous replication.

For Lenovo, storage tends to be an opportunity to help the company sell entire infrastructure solutions and at a healthy margin. Adding Infinidat to the portfolio will allow Lenovo to activate its large sales force and channel partners to sell Infinidat products, likely greatly extending the reach of the storage platforms to new customers and segments.
Final Words
For many in the ecosystem, this will be a sizable change. Lenovo has historically had several partners, such as NetApp, on which it has leaned in the enterprise storage space. By purchasing Infinidat, Lenovo will have a new product in its space that it can offer customers under its own label.
What is interesting is that this is an acquisition for enterprise focused storage. We see the AI storage and the more traditional enterprise markets diverging in requirements quite a bit, so perhaps the more notable part about this acquisition is that the company is bolstering its position for enteprise workloads here during the great AI infrastructure buildout. Usually when we see this type of acquisition, a server vendor sees a substantial opportunity to integrate new product and sell it through its channel. Our sense is that is what is happening here with Lenovo and Infinidat.