Lenovo has taken a more aggressive stance towards the AMD EPYC 7003 series launching several new models. Some vendors are just adding firmware updates to their Rome lineups to support the new chips in existing platforms. Lenovo is expanding several lines with new servers. This is a major vote of confidence for the new AMD platform.
New Lenovo ThinkSystem Rack Servers
Lenovo has new rack servers including the new 2-socket Lenovo ThinkSystem SR645 and SR665 and new Lenovo ThinkSystem 1-socket SR635 and SR655 servers. Lenovo was not the fastest to support the Naples generation. Indeed, the company effectively brought AMD to its customer base with the Rome generation. Seeing a large number of new servers is a big deal as it means that Lenovo is getting demand from customers.
One of the really interesting features is Lenovo’s cooling solution which you can see has a large heat pipe cooler that brings the heatsink fins up to the fan partition.
Lenovo says its dual-socket ThinkSystem SR645 and SR665 servers will be available in the next few days. Its single-socket ThinkSystem SR635 and SR655 servers will be available in June. That is a long time to wait. In the meantime, if you are looking for single-socket solutions for AMD EPYC, STH has a fairly large set of reviews from competitive systems.
Lenovo ThinkAgile HCI with Milan
Aside from its standard rack servers, Lenovo also has a new ThinkAgile VX series around the EPYC 7003 series. These solutions offer VMware vSAN integration and have a number of different configurations. Here is the list from Lenovo:
- ThinkAgile VX3575-G: Designed for compute-heavy applications such as VDI and AI workloads with the ability to support up to eight NVIDIA GPUs
- ThinkAgile VX5575: Offers a storage-dense 2U solution for fast, high-capacity storage applications including email management, data, and analytics
- ThinkAgile VX7575 and ThinkAgile VX7576: Optimized 2U for high-performance workloads such as analytics and databases (Source: Lenovo)
These AMD-based Lenovo ThinkAgile VX solutions will be available in Q2 2021 which we take to usually mean June, but they may surprise us and release earlier.
VMware is not the only partner solution. Lenovo is also launching the ThinkAgile HX3375 and HX3376 series. These ThinkAgile HX series solutions will not be available until Q3, however, they will support Nutanix for hyper-converged infrastructure.
We were slightly surprised to see that Lenovo did not announce a Microsoft solution as well. Still, adding VMware and Nutanix solutions will be a big deal for customers who want a validated HCI solution from Lenovo.
Final Words
At first, this may seem insignificant, but there is a clear trend. Dell EMC, HPE, and others aggressively expanded portfolios in this generation. Even though AMD EPYC 7002 “Rome” had a big advantage over the 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable, it almost seems like these vendors evaluated Ice Lake Xeon and AMD EPYC Milan and chose to increase the number of platforms for the new parts. We have already seen what Milan can do, Ice Lake will be next.
I wonder why the 1 sockets are the ones that are delayed. I’d assume that those are the less complex case in terms of trace routing and PCB manufacture; and one of the killer cases of high core count Epyc is 2 -> 1 socket consolidation.
Are they targeting 4 -> 2 consolidation? Does 7003 bring bigger benefits to dual socket so it was more urgent to get those out, while 7002- based 1 socket systems, possibly with bios updates for 7003, are seen as adequate?
@Fuzzyfuzzyfungus, I bet Lenovo may provide kind of pre-general availability code for customer testing within 1 socket AMD Milan servers in April. Why don’t you ask at Lenovo?
@Fuzzyfuzzyfungus, I bet Lenovo will be ready to provide kind of pre-general availability code for 1S AMD Milan servers customer testing in April. Have you asked at Lenovo?