Name: Community Call: ThinkSystem Storage Update and Premier Support Plus for Storage
Uploaded: 2026-10-08T14:16:18.709Z
Duration: 1 h 2 min 44 s
Description: Community Call: ThinkSystem Storage Update and Premier Support Plus for Storage

Transcript for "Community Call: ThinkSystem Storage Update and Premier Support Plus for Storage": Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us this afternoon for this week's community call. We're gonna be focused on storage today and two aspects of storage, some exciting new support offerings that we have with Premier Support Plus, and then it's also some new announcements from the Think system in our DE range, some exciting new models inside that product set. Before we get into the meat of the presentation, just some quick housekeeping items from me. Most of you have heard me join the sessions before, so I've seen this before. But top right of your screen, there's a chat option. So you can go drop any comments in there. We like to kinda poll the audience and see what countries people are joining from, so drop that in if you've got some time. Next to the chat tab, there's one which says, which says, docs. And I've uploaded some things into the docs. So first up, there is a survey link. I would appreciate it if towards the end of the presentation, you you click on that link and just give us some feedback on the session. I've given you a copy of each of the two presentations as a handout, and then also a link to Lenovo Press with with some... With an article on the the new ThinkSystem storage models that that, Rob will chat us through. And then to arrive to that is the q and a button. If you could drop any questions you have into that session, and then we'll we'll have a separate QA for the for the for the for the services section and a sec... Separate q and a for for Rob's section a bit later. Next step is you can switch on closed captioning. So it'll put a... That will transcribe what I'm saying to you about across the bottom of the screen for you. And if you want to, you can switch on translation as well. So perhaps English isn't your first language and you'd like to see the translation, there's a list of languages you can go choose from there. And then last but not least, if you wanna increase the size of the presentation screen, there's a button there, that kind of... The square with the dotted... The the dotted square. If you click on that, it'll take the presentation to full screen. To get out of that mode, you just push escape, then it'll take you back to the screen you're seeing at the moment. The session is recorded. Using the same link that you used to join the session, you can watch the recording, and the follow-up email will also give you a link to that recording. And then, again, if you wouldn't mind doing the the the survey, there's a QR code there. You could scan quickly now. Or alternatively, as I said before, under docs, there's a link to it over there. I'm gonna ask our first two speakers to join me on stage. We have Katharine, who's a worldwide services product manager with Lenovo, and she's joined by Sonia, who's part of our portfolio enable... Who's a portfolio enablement manager within our services team. Thanks thanks, both. Over to you. Thank you very much. So just wanna double check whether you can see me and hear me well before I start. Yeah. I. can hear you, So... Sonia. Yep. I think. you're good. Okay. Thank you. Thanks for confirming. So, okay. Thank you very much for for the introduction. And, before we get into the details of Premier Support Plus for storage today, I would like to start with the challenges that customers are facing today and why the traditional support may not longer be enough for them. When customers buy storage, it's not just buying the infrastructure. They're, keeping their applications running, their data available, and also their business in moving. And the challenge is that the storage environments are becoming larger and more complex every year. And, at the same time, the data continues to grow and the IT teams are often expected to manage this with lack of resources. One thing we often see is that major disruptions rarely start as major disruptions. So what they usually start with are really small signs like performance begins to slow down or capacity becomes, harder to manage. There are recovery problems, and different teams are looking in different parts of the system. And because all... These... All areas are connected and problem in one area can very quickly affect other areas like performance, like, recovery, and also the business continuity, It's not only about fixing something that breaks, it's... Or the... It should be also about, catching the problems early. And, here is just a quick summary, what we are hearing from our customers today. So they want better visibility across the storage environment. They want to reduce the risk. They want, earlier insights into potential issues. And of course what they want is confidence in their system that they are supporting the critical data when they need. So instead on focusing on support contracts, we can have more strategic info, like conversations here. We can talk about resilience. We can talk about reducing the operational risk. And also, we can talk about how customer can stay ahead of the problems. And this is where, Premier Support Plus comes in. So we designed this, for customers to move them from reacting to the issue, towards identifying and addressing them upfront. This offering combines the proactive and predictive support capabilities with direct access to the line of all storage experts. And it also helps, strengthen the long term relationship with the customers by supporting them through their journey, by growing the data grow... By, the data growth and also, in supporting them through their AI journey. And now I'll hand over to my colleague Catherine, and she will, take you through the offering details and also how the offering works. And, Catherine, over to, you, please. Sonia. Can you hear me okay? Yes. We can hear you well. Perfect. I am going to talk about more about the features of the offering. It comes as standard with four hour response, premium four hour response, includes a designated service engagement manager, and they're also supported by Storage Technical Account Manager or TAM. With Premier Support Plus for storage, there's also escalation management included. The key differentiator from previous offerings is the proactive and predictive capabilities. Customers with PSP storage will also have access to premier storage specialists within the premier team, and they will have access to a level of how to support via the SIEM and the storage TAM as well as the premier support team. Now, that is limited in scope. It doesn't completely replace deployment or installation, but they will be there for those customers to help with guidance and assistance when it comes to, for example, auto support enablement or firmware update recommendations. Keep your drive is also included with PSP for storage and there is the option to upgrade to CSR as well. Just a little bit of detail on suitability for Premier Support Plus for storage. It is enabled on the majority of DM, DG, DS, and DE storage. 36 machine types and scope, and you'll see links within the presentation to the machine types and scope and out of scope. The service availability mirrors where premier four hour response is available, and service locator tool can help to confirm coverage for that. There's no minimum order level to access PSP for storage, so the customer may be buying multiple machines in the same order or they have pipeline to buy multiples in the future. There's also an opportunity to upgrade from existing Premier Support or Pays via special bed part number or CBSO contract. In terms of the limitations, certain older DM and DG machines are excluded from the scope for PSP storage. Like I've mentioned before, this is just a link to the end scope and out of scope machine types that you can reference afterwards. Four hour response as the minimum service level, and it does come as a package of features, so it's not possible to downgrade or to strip out certain elements of the offering. The same will only provide cover for PSP entitled machines, but as I've mentioned previously, there is an option to upgrade any existing machines to PSP storage. Now, this is one of the most important post sale requirements. As part of the process to allocate a same, we do require that an onboarding form is completed. Now it's very simple. There's about 13 straightforward questions, and the purpose of that is to make sure that the SIEM knows as quickly and efficiently as possible who the end user customer is so that they can make contact and start the onboarding process. Both Enter Lenovo sellers as well as customers and partners can complete the form. You can access it using the QR codes shown now or there's a link as part of the presentation as well. But this is a really key part to ensure that the customer experiences as it should be from the beginning. In terms of auto support for PSP storage, this now works in conjunction with Lenovo AI to provide proactive and predictive capabilities for PSP storage customers. That uses AI driven analytics to identify potential issues before they occur. There's two paths that you'll see there, the proactive path, where auto support will detect a serviceable event. Those events are sent securely to Lenovo and a service ticket is automatically created. Lenovo then facilitates parts dispatch and the storage is fixed ultimately after the failure is reported, but much more quickly and efficiently than it would be if the customer had to recognize the problem themselves and then report it. With the predictive path, daily log data is sent securely to Lenovo. AI predicts a failure, and then the same process begins again. The service ticket is automatically created, Lenovo facilitates parts dispatch, and ultimately with this pathway, the storage is fixed before the issue occurs. I'll talk in more detail in a couple of slides, but just to highlight at this point that all customer data resides within Lenovo systems. The only data that is transmitted via logs as system level data such as serial numbers, number of drives, etc. No customer identifiable information. In terms of the proactive capability, we'll now get e mail notification for all types of events. Some events are shared directly with the Premier team, so that's the majority of them, of the list that you can see on the right, alert, critical, emergency, and error. Then warning events, which are more informational, will be available to the same for reporting purposes. There's a new sex type of event as well, which allows us to track the predictive events. Then in the middle here you'll see a list of the components that are included for proactive capability. When it comes to predictive capability, the AI will analyze telemetry data using the modeling and training to predict imminent failures, and that's measured by accuracy, precision, and recall. You can see the targets and the bottom right for the measure and for each of the measures and the targets for each of those. Auto support registration or enablement and service registration are a prerequisite for the proactive and predictive capability, so that's important to note as well. Then when it comes to security and data privacy concerns, Just to reiterate this message that Lenovo does not remotely connect to or retrieve any information from customer environments. It's a push based telemetry model. Auto support sends system health and diagnostic information for analysis, but no customer data applications or files are accessed. You can just see some detail of what the type of data that auto support sends versus what is not shared. Customer files, application data, customer identifiable information, and sensitive business information is never shared via auto support. Just to compare standard versus Premiere versus where we are now with Premiere Support Plus, you can see that where we had recommended add ons before, those are now all included. As I've mentioned at the beginning, keep your drive, dedicated account management, monthly reports, and quarterly business reviews will be delivered by the same, and then event alerts via auto support. I'm just highlighting here that there's 45 markets within Europe and Meta where Premier Support Plus is available. And and like I'd said previously, that just matters where Premier Support for our responses available. So that's the only prerequisite for availability of PSP. As important to note that the advanced technical support is primarily in English only, although they will endeavor to translate via other premier colleagues where they're able to, but as part of the Ts and Cs, that's not something that's included as standard, so just keep that in mind. Again, the Service Engagement Manager is primarily English only depending on availability. If they're able to speak another language, then they will, but the only guaranteed language is English for now. In terms of the key takeaways then from my perspective, Premier Support Plus for storage is available for DM, DG, DS, and DE with some exceptions. The four key features are four hour response, proactive and productive support powered by AI, designated SIEM as well as access to storage time and keep your drive. The AI will predict failures for drives, power supplies, and fans, and the proactive capability will also proactively raise tickets when other failures occur. The Service Engagement Manager is the dedicated resource. They will be the person that reaches out to the customer for onboarding, quarterly reports, and business reviews as well. It comes as standard with four hour response, but it can be upgraded to six hour CSR. So, in terms of our request to you as to identify customers who are already exploring PES and consider PSP, talk to them about this new offering and identify the customers that may benefit from upgrading from existing Premier or Pays to PSP storage and ultimately create new PSP storage opportunities. There's just some links here to the partner facing landing page, a customer facing landing page that you can share with customers and the service locator tool. Then we're going to Q and A. Excellent. Thank you so much. Fred, if you wanna join us on stage as well. I suppose one question has come up a few times is is how do we address concerns the customer has about security? Because we're kinda linking to their systems. How do we how do we make the customer feel secure that the the data is safe from us, but that, you know, it doesn't pose a security risk for them? So, Catherine, you want me to take. that, If you're okay to take that one, morning, Fred, good afternoon? expand a little bit. Thank you. Yep. Yep. For... So everybody on the call, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. So security, again, as Catherine mentioned, auto support, it's a push model. So the customers need to open up, pathways through their through their infrastructure, and they control the security settings. Lenovo is not, pulling any data. So as long as your IT organization, allows that open gateway to send information out, there shouldn't be any security concerns. And, again, the logs that we get through auto support, there is no customer identifiable information. There is no content that's saved on the drives that's transferred. It's, simply system information. Okay. So. the the security risk is very low. Yes. Perfect. And we had a question. Can we... Can existing customers... So if you're an existing customer on premier support, is there an upgrade path to go to premier support plus? That is, yes. Via both part number and CBSO contract, there's the option to upgrade from Premier Support or Premier Enhanced Storage Support pays to Premier Support Plus for storage. Okay. Great. So existing customers can leverage the the new benefits of premium support. plus. Yeah. You mentioned PES, PESX, and PSP. What is the what is the key advantage of PSP versus the the the the the PESX offering? The main differentiator is the proactive and productive capability and the introduction of AI. The other change that we've made is that the same will now be designated to the customer rather than storage TAM, but storage customers will still have access to storage TAM. One of the main reasons for that is that we've also recently launched Premier Support Plus for Server that includes the same. What that means is if the customer has both PSP Server and PSP Storage, they'll have the same point of contact for each of those. But like I say with PSP Storage, they will also have access to storage technical resource as well. So the the the engagement manager gives me a single interface back into into Lenovo, and then we can draw in the resources of a TAM or a technical account manager if we need to. Exactly. Yep. Great. I don't see any other questions at the moment on the link, which says, Masa did a really good job of explaining everything. That's fantastic. Just a reminder to everyone, if you could please complete the survey, the link is either in the docs or if you scan the QR code there. And, there are some specific questions around this new storage offering. We really appreciate your feedback on it. It lets us understand, how you're feeling about it, any questions you might have it. So please complete the survey data for us there. Services team, unless you've got any final points, I'm gonna invite Robin to stage with me to talk about our new ThinkSystem announcements. Alright. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Mister Brazier, welcome. And, I don't think you need much of an introduction. You're well known on these calls. So I'm gonna just hand over straight to you and and ask you to tell us about what's happening in the land of think system storage. Thanks, Rob. I'm not getting your audio, Rob. How about now? Can you hear me now? Now we can. Fixed it. it. I I don't know if you saw. it, but there was a question. in the chat, from Sanjesh Kumar around the services about upgrading from premier to premier support plus and how they do that and things like that. I don't. know We we did cover that. You can either. do it as part... it. As a plot number or as a or as a contract upgrade. So we did cover that. Thanks, Perfect. Rob. Yeah. No worries. I just didn't know whether it was touched. That's good. Thank you. Perfect. Alright. Let's, get on with the show then, shall we? So, everybody, thanks for joining us today, and thanks for, the services team for going through PSP for storage. Especially love that. So today, I have a bit of a, an announcement for you all. But I always start my kind of conversations just to refresh everyone's memories around, the low... Lenovo, storage portfolio in its whole. So we have on the left the enterprise storage piece, and then on the right, that hyperconverged, storage piece or solution piece because, really, it's compute networking and storage all in the same box. But, you know, we have a complete storage solutions portfolio with Lenovo. We've got the services, as you just heard from the services team, not only just to support, the platforms, obviously manage them, but we also have the ability to implement, provide advice, and, other kinds of, support in that way. Of course, we couldn't do any of these things without our solution partners as well. You can see on the screen that we have, many, and that's not all of them. That's just a a collection that would nicely fit on the screen. But, there's this... We work with so many different ISVs and solution partners, to create wonderful and complete solutions for you guys to take to our customers. But today, I'm gonna focus in on the, enterprise storage side of things in red. If you can see it there, I'm gonna move my mouse and hope that it makes something on the screen. But in red, the DE series. So we have just literally announced on the sixth. So earlier this week, we have announced two new platforms for our storage, and that is the DE 6,500 and DE 6,800, storage platforms. They're part of our d e storage range. They are block storage only. But, ultimately, we have a kind of a two pronged, portfolio strategy with these two platforms. The d e 6,500 is really designed for virtualization workloads, technical compute workloads designed for, performant virtualization storage, that kind of thing. And then you also have things like the... Well, you have the the d e 6,800, which really is driving, differentiation in terms of its performance. It's our fastest storage array in terms of IOPS and throughput, in our portfolio. And it's really designed for kind of high end AI workloads and HPC workloads. In terms of architecture, there's a bit of a uniqueness to the the new platforms. So, they are able to mix both, flash technologies in the head unit, so both TLC flash and QLC flash in the head unit, allowing you to basically balance, the storage required for the workloads that you want to run on there. And then if you're looking for additional expansion, additional capacity, we do have, SaaS based, expansion options for the platform. So you can have NVMe drives in the head unit and SaaS expansions to, basically provide investment protection, provide that additional capacity that customers might need beyond what we can provide via the TLC and QLC drives in the head unit. Of course, you know, these platforms, they're designed to, basically modernize the current install base. You'll see through the next current slides how, you know, the platform, the 6,500, is really taking over the the place of things like our d e 4,800 platform because it is a, more performant platform in a similar price band to the to the 4,800. As well, it's 5% difference, really. So it's really more capability, more flexibility, all that investment protection because it's the latest NVMe technology, but with, obviously, the seven year, support protection that is available through Lenovo on our new, storage platforms. So, you know, we're able to provide really interesting, differentiated portfolio here with, obviously, the latest in GME technology, and able to provide our partners, yourselves, a a way to really, improve and, accelerate customers' existing install bases. So if we move on one slide, the 6,500, if you're shrewd and you know the Lenovo storage portfolio, this... Apart from the little logo on the right hand side of the front there, it looks very similar to some of our other storage platforms. And the great thing about this is we are consolidating the different platform hardware that we have onto fewer and fewer, different array heads. And what that means is we're able to get economies of scale, which drives down the cost of these controller heads alongside the things like the the DM, the DG, the DS platforms, which they use the same controller architecture. So it's the same hardware. We're getting way more IOPS out of the DE platform. So whereas the d e 4,800 f was topping out around about 900,000 IOPS, this one tops out at 1,700,000 IOPS. And in terms of throughput, we're up to 41 gigs per second, throughput on this platform. Available with, obviously, fiber channel and iSCSI connectivity. So we have, I think, up to 200 gig iSCSI on the 6,800, up to 100 on the 6,500. But when it's your typical virtualization workload, you're normally connecting at sort of 25 giga SCSI. So, you know, that's absolutely fine. We've got, multiple slots for host interface on the platform. So, typically speaking, you'll have, minimum of two host interface cards, and then a SaaS expander for, the SaaS expansion. So, plenty of IO... So when I say two host interface cards, that's per controller. So four in total on the the whole platform. Don't don't worry when I say silly things like that. It's just me catching myself out, but that's that's two host interface cards per controller. And there's two controllers in the platform. So, you know, four host interface cards. So, you know, a typical ten twenty five gig card's four ports. So two of those in each controller. That's a lot of ports. Alright? Oh, it's not moving on with a keyboard. I have to click the button. So the 6,800, looks exactly the same. So the pictures are virtually the same except for the little logo on the right hand side. If you blow that up, it will say 6,800. But internally, it's much faster processor, much more performant, more RAM. So we'll be able to deliver, up to 5,000,000 IOPS on the 6,800, and up to a 110 gigs a second throughput. Again, we've got a bit more connectivity options with the 6,800, you know, standard fiber channel connectivity. But, also, you can see there InfiniBand, and also the RoCE and Gimi over RoCE. So, you know, lots of, different, protocol options there. Connectivity speeds, 60... 32, 64 gig, on the fiber side of things, and then up to 200 gig on the the Ethernet side of things and a thin band. K? So where are we? So on the sixth, we announced platforms, and they will start shipping... Excuse me a second. They'll start shipping on the thirtieth of, December... Of December 30. Not... October 30. So they are available in DCSE today. Excuse me. They are, gonna start shipping from the end of October. They are really gonna take out the existing NVMe platform, so the $6,466,100, the platform. I mean, there's no reason to position those platforms unless you've got an existing opportunity where you've already done the configurations, already done all the bid work, and $6,466,100 are the ones you need to ship this quarter, absolutely fine. If you're starting fresh with a new customer today, 6,500, 6,800 all day long. The 6,500 will be going into TCE from q four. So from the January 1... Well, the January 4, really. We'll have the 6,500 into TCE, so you'd be able to configure it there. We'll see that means that the delivery time scales will be that ten day, ship time that we, love to promote with the TCE port... Portfolios. 6,800 stays outside of that, but, you know, it's a specialist project box. So, typically, we're, working on the, material for that long before the actual customer signs the PO. So expect the 64 and 6,600 to go away rapidly. So the last order date on those platforms, will be the end of December. So that means our productions will stop, at the end of March. So your last order is December because of shortages or whatever that may... Might mean that the production is delayed, but, you know, our last production date for those platforms be the end of March. It also has accelerated the withdrawal of the 4,800 f. So the 4,800 along with the 4,200 hybrid models, those ones will carry on. They're gonna carry on for a number of, years. But this 4,800 f, because the cost point of it between the 4,800 f and the 6,500, it's almost identical. It's 5% different today, and I expect that to close in the next couple months. And the 4,800, less performance, less throughput, SAS backplane only. You know, it has no no NVMe capabilities. It's not got that flexible, architecture around t... TLC and QLC Flash. So, you know, it's been outmoded. The 6,500 really outmoded it in that mid range, sort of virtualization space, technical compute space. So the 6,500, I expect, will be the the play there. And that's the family. You know, the the full, the portfolio after the withdrawal of the 64 and the 66 hundreds, which would be around about here and here. Then the 4,800 f is not long for this world. We'll have a slightly longer transition out to the middle of next year. So, you know, getting more dense storage in the d platform with the QLC drives up to 60 terabytes today, well, when the QLC launch. So QLC launches not now. I will say this now to you because if you go configuring it now and you look for it, you won't see QLC. We have to wait for the drive manufacturer to produce the latest version of their QLC drive. So we have to wait till March for the QLC on these platforms just to be completely open and honest with you all. So the the drive technology that we have in the DGs, we're currently, in a transition from old drives to the new drives. We're currently running through our drives on the d g side of things. But the d e, $65.68 hundreds will pick up the new drives in March. K? Just to be a 100% upfront with you all. But, again, you know, the 6,500 general SMB compute workloads, virtualization kind of workloads, I really see this as a kind of a three tier virtualization package. The 6,800 is really playing in that ultra low latency HPC kind of workload. Lustre BGFS are two kind of workload areas we're trying to, position the 6,800 with. So, yeah, decent portfolio. Again, don't forget about the entry, SaaS models, the d e forty two hundred and forty eight hundred hybrid models. Those won't be going anywhere. So, yeah, continue to position those in the in the smaller, cheaper, price bands. So I mentioned this already. You can mix and match TLC and QLC into the platform. Obviously, there are, minimum drive quantities for that, because of rate, volume groups, and things like that. But, ultimately, by being able to mix the TLC and QLC flash in that head control node, you have up to 24 slots for drives. You're able to match your flash media to the workload ultimately. So if you need that high performance, low latency workload, it needs to run on TLC. If you're looking for a bit more capacity flash, 30 terabyte or or 60 terabyte QLC, that is those drives. And then if you deep beyond that, then, obviously, we have the SaaS expansions, for additional, Flash and mechanical SaaS, for the platforms. So it's a really interesting box. I haven't had a platform in our portfolio that's been able to mix the, the Flash media before. So it's a really, interesting and unique thing for the platform. Again, you know, as we move through time, technology is moving along with it. So at the moment, you know, a lot of our systems were based on SaaS. You know? Even our d forty two hundred and forty eight hundred are still based on SaaS. But all of our d m, d g, d s platforms migrated to the NVMe architecture recently, and they're all NVMe first. And, you know, that technology, it opens up much faster, throughput because you don't have the bottlenecks of SAS. You know, you have a much better queue depth. You have much better direct connection to the CPU using NVMe rather than, SAS HPA to connect you to the, processor. You know, there's all sorts of bottlenecks built into the SAS architecture that, you know, it's it's great. It's reliable. But NVMe is just opening up the ability to really drive and deal with data intensive workloads. So that's why, you know, these platforms are NVMe in the head units and then SAS in the expansion if someone really needs that, drive count and, expansion capability. K? To answer John John's question there, I can see straight away, no. You can't mix them in the same volume. They need to be separated. With the QLC technology in the head unit, we're able to do something a little bit different. So, typically, you have your traditional RAID six arrays. You know, that's fine. That's been the same for years and years and years and years. Obviously, we introduced DDP with the DE series, which is good. It improves massively in terms of the drive recovery time, but you definitely suffer a bit in terms of the, usable capacity. Now with this new release, and using QLC drives, we're able to provide a a new DDP level, which gets you back some of that usable capacity. So you can see it's just behind your traditional RAID six array in terms of efficiency, but way ahead of where DDP is. But you still get that, really nice drive recovery times. You're able to... In in the event of a drive failing, you're able to get your resiliency back up and running, a lot faster, using DDP or DDP, the new one, using this new technology, but without losing so much capacity. So that's a new interesting function within our platform. Again, trying to eke out as much capacity and as much economics out of the box as we can. So, nice little ad there for for the platforms. So, in terms of where we're positioning these platforms, you know, we have, Veeam ready on almost all of our storage platforms when... For chart, I don't have it with me today. But, you know, the first thing we did when we heard the DE, platform was launching was, okay. I want to... Available, as part of the Veeam solution. So tech is Veeam ready out of the box. So we're ready to go on the Veeam front. Again, high speed databases. You know? These things, 1,700,000 IOPS, huge bandwidth, SAP HANA, perfect workload. You know, that's exactly the kind of thing we wanna try and, run on these platforms. And, again, you know, we have plenty of RAS features in these platforms to protect data. You know, we have the DDP RAID. We have the dual power supplies, all those kind of function features. Obviously, two controllers in the head unit. So, you know, we have all of those things to support the high availability of the... An SAP HANA environment in here. Again, you know, using a DE platform over something like a DS or DM or whatever, you know, is more cost of a... Cost effective scaling as long as you don't need to scale out in terms of, performance because, obviously, DE, you can't cluster. Alright. Other workloads, obviously, which goes without saying, I've mentioned already virtualization three tier. I just use VMware here because, well, they're massive part of the market still. But if you wanna do three tier with Nutanix, sure. If you wanna do it with, Microsoft, go ahead. You know, we have a vCenter plug in for DE, so it makes it slightly easier to manage the, environment through vCenter for those that are used to working with... Within vCenter and and the VMware ecosystem. Absolutely fine to manage these systems within that. You can, of course, manage these systems, through system manager, SAN manager, or, ThinkSystem Intelligent Monitoring Tool. If you switch on the, the auto support, it'll connect and we'll be able to, offer customers the visuals on that. And, ultimately, in the long term... I say long term. More midterm now. The Tim tool is being updated so partners yourselves will get access to be able to see what your customers' arrays are doing, and that's gonna be useful. So watch out for an announce from me when we do that. That is actually not the long long distance viewer anymore. It's more midterm. Okay? Okay. Virtualization. There you go. Hyper V. So I don't I don't really mind if you wanna run Nutanix or VMware or Microsoft Hyper V. Virtualization is where the 6,500 is really great at. And, of course, we position it there in the in the large space for a large enterprise virtualization. Absolutely fine. You know, it's an absolute workhorse, the 6,500. The 6,800, it takes to an all new level. As in whether you need 5,000,000 IOPS in a in a virtualization environment. But, hey, if you do, please go ahead. Be my guest. Again, on the vCenter side of things, I'm not gonna hover here. Everyone knows vCenter, what you can do within that with, the e systems. So more interesting. So on the d e 6,800 because of its performance and capabilities, you know, one of the things that we really wanna try and do in the AI and HPC space is is connect it to, those kind of workloads. So BGFS, trying to provide, essentially, high throughput file access for AI. You know, that's, something that... Although the d 6,800 doesn't do file, it can provide the storage behind the servers that does it. So, you know, that's where we're kind of positioned in the 6,800, really, in the the entry level, not entry level, entry HPC kind of workloads, entry AI kind of workloads. That's where we wanna try and position the 6,800. And, again, you know, luster as well, extreme performance, again, for kind of that parallel file access, for, again, AI workloads, HPC workloads. Again, you know, we don't do file on the platform. It just does sandbox storage, but it does it really, really fast with a lot of bandwidth. And so we'll see you connect it up to the Lustre servers and provide that that parallel file system through those servers. So either storage is providing the back end capacity. It does storage the best. And I think, you know, connecting the storage, to those servers, providing that whole solution, into the AI space or the HPC space, absolutely spot on. So, watch out for some more details on that from us as we, go through the, launch process, the '68 and '65 hundreds. We'll have some, like, solution briefs and stuff like that for this. So, I don't know. The blue on the red isn't a great thing in my eyes. So, hopefully, you can all see that. But, ultimately, Bevan, I believe, has shared in the docs the slides, so you'd be able to click all those links. Links to all the product guides in Lenovo press. Links to the datasheet are there. You can configure these now in DCSE, so both the sixty five hundred and sixty eight hundred are there for you to configure. Obviously, the Lenovo Compete tool, you don't know if many people know about the Compete tool, but it's a tool that Lenovo uses to, really position the platforms against its equivalent competition from, like, sort of Dell or HP or, I think even, Pure and IBM are in there as well last I checked. So it's worth remembering that Compete tool exists because it's not just for storage. It's for, service as well. But LSSC or the Lenovo sizing tool... That should be LSST, not LSSE. Pardon me. So the Lenovo storage sizing tool, which is available to you all from LPH, or you can just go directly through that link there, the storagesizingtools.lenovo.com. That will take you straight to the tool where you can size the the DE platform as against the workloads your customers might be running. So if you know how how much throughput they need, whether it's, I don't know, sixty forty, seventy thirty in terms of readwrite splits, what, well, all all the different parameters of your workload, you can put in there, build the storage system around it. It'll give you what platform you need in order to be able to provide that usable capacity of storage and that performance level that the workload requires. So if you haven't used LSST before, then I would urge you all to go and, kick the tires, figure it out because, you know, if you're positioning Lenovo storage, you need to use that tool next to DCSE. DCSE will get you the configuration that you can put through LBP and LBPE to do the pricing. But the sizing tool is getting you the config that goes into DCSE. So you use it and abuse it. And if you find errors, make sure you flag them up because, team will fix it as fast as possible. Now they are available on our website. So the 6,500, 6,800 product pages are are clickable there. What's still missing, and I'm, got it. It's missing still is three d tour. You know? The three d tour video, you know, that is very helpful when you're sat in front of a customer and you wanna show the system, show the ports at the back and everything like that as part of things like the the the product guide and data sheets, you know, the three d tours. I really appreciate when they're done, but, unfortunately, they are slightly delayed. So, they are coming soon. I will, hopefully, be able to get you a link for that, as soon as possible. I was hoping it would be done for... By today, but they're still not done. So, unfortunately, I will get you the link as soon as I can. In terms of solution brief, so you talked a bit about all those, not convo... But convo... There as well. So, solution briefs for our our store solutions are all here, so you can click on those, have a look at that, and use that when you're engaging with customers. So please, use and abuse those, and they're there for you. And questions? Let me join you on stage, Rob. Thanks. So, So, Rob, just for the high level positioning, 6,500, more general purpose workloads, great back end for virtualization, Yep. 6,800 more AI kind of HPC workloads. That's right. Exactly that. So, you know, there... There's two platforms, and the 65 hundred's really killing two birds with one stone because it's it's taking out that 4,800 flash model because, you know, it's it's SAS backplane. It's SAS through and through, and it just has all the the bottlenecks of SAS architecture. So the 4,800, unfortunately, is is not long for this world. And then, you know, the 6,800... Well, sorry. I should say the 6,400 is totally replaced by the 6,500. So unless you've got an existing customer that needs 6,400 now, you know, I'd position the 6,500 from now. And then that 6,800 is absolutely a high end workhorse, 5,000,000 IOPS out of each platform, you know, in a lesser environment where you might be scaling that with multiple 68 hundreds with multiple servers in a cluster. You know, you're creating a absolute beast of a storage system. So, you know, for those HPC workloads, those AI model training workloads, it... Then it's really interesting. And then, Rob, I mean, so we see the big jumps. There's big jumps in the IOPS, big jumps in the throughput. But kind of the key difference here is that we... We're gonna be able to tier the two types of NVMe drives, like the the TLC and the QLC. Yeah. So, you know, it's the first time in the DE space that we've had QLC drives. We've not had QLC available in DE at all, up until now. So it's been the realm of the the d g's mainly in the d s 5,200 c when that launched. So having QLC drives in the in the d e space is is really interesting. You know, they come in thirty and sixty terabyte packages. We didn't launch the 15 terabyte QLC drive because, unfortunately, it's not long for this world either. So, you know, the drive vendors would be moving away from that smaller capacity QLC drive when they start launching things like 120 terabyte QLCs. But, you know, we'll qualify those into the platforms as we go. So, yeah, being able to mix and match, that's pretty unique. You know? I... I've been looking, and, you know, there's not that many people that can mix and match QLC and TLC. I think IBM do with their Flash core modules a little bit. I've mostly NetApp do, but not so much. I haven't seen it, and I'll be honest. I haven't I haven't seen it, but they might do it. But I haven't seen it from HP or or from Dell. So, you know, it's pretty unique thing from our side of things to be able to mix those drive tech in the in the controller head and and then, build those workloads around those drives. Obviously, someone like IBM, they're gonna start talking about things like tiering. We don't do tiering with our DE platforms. It's basically workload mapping. Map the workload to the Flash. Don't try and move it around the Flash because you're just creating work for the platform. It's just unnecessary. Build the build the drives and the rates that's in the config for the workload and don't try to move it off unless, of course, you're doing some archive work, but then that's... It's a different story. So, you know, you're doing different things then. Got it. And, Rob, there's a question if we've got any guidelines on how, you know, what the best practices would be for that intermix if we... If we're gonna do both TLC and QLC. So there are some guidelines. Obviously, you need to have minimum drive counts for each technology. I believe it's 12 for the QLC because it's, DDP, and I believe it's four, six for the TLC. Top of my head, I can't remember, but I think it's it's quite a lot smaller for the TLC drives because you could do RAID six with them if you really wanted to. But, you know, I think, you know, it really depends on customer's workload, how many of the drives you're going to, mix, and and how many of them you're gonna have in there. But, again, I think there was a question in the in the chat around whether you could put a volume across both TLC and QLC, and the answer is certainly not. There was another question from a Pule, regarding whether an existing customer on 4,800 should, rip rip and replace for the 6,500. I would probably not do that. I would wait until their storage refresh cycle because, ultimately, you know, that customer... 4,800 f hasn't actually been in our portfolio for that long. We launched it a year ago, maybe. I can't remember the exact date. It was, like, April last year or before that slightly. Trying to remember all my dates now. I did the call not so long ago, I'm sure. But, ultimately, you know, the the 4,800 f, I wouldn't rip and replace that. Obviously, it's covering the customer's workloads today. You know, if they were looking for new projects, deploying new workloads, and things like that, then maybe maybe they would wanna look at upgrading. But, you know, if they're running their environment today, and it's doing all of the performance that they need and they just need maybe more capacity, I wouldn't I wouldn't rip it out to swap to the 6,500. I would do it as part of a refresh. Absolutely. And then, Rob, we spoke about the intermix with the two different NVMe technologies. Yep. Of the same control, I can also support SaaS. That's right. So in the back end of the platform, you have, SAS expansion. So you can connect, the d e one twenty, two forty, or 600 expansion units to these platforms. So you could have a combination of some, SaaS SSDs. You could put some three and a half inch in there if you wanted to. 10 k, wouldn't because that's, not long for this world. But, certainly, Nearline SaaS, up to 24 terabyte drives, absolutely fine. Bigger capacity is coming soon, but up to 24 terabyte drives are available in in the Nearline space. Excellent. And I assume that's why we've dropped the h and the f suffixes on the models. because. You are very astute there, Bevan. Yep. So, you know, for those that have been with the, storage business a while, they'll know that we have an h and an f suffix to most of our platforms, and that was to denote whether they were hybrid or all flash. And these platforms, I mean, we decided that they just didn't need that because of their flexibility. I wanted to give maximum flexibility. I didn't want to have to plan 6,500 h controllers and 6,500 f controllers and have separate pots of parts for for the two things. So it just didn't make any sense. So in the in the best way possible, I'm trying to get simplification in the back end in terms of parts, controllers, bits and pieces so that stuff isn't siloed into the h space and and not in the f space. You kind of spoke about simplifying the lineup and making it easier for everyone. Yep. We've got a few questions and some... And and John put it nicely. He said the elephant's in the room. At the storage offering, Infinidat. Can we say anything? When can we say something? So I can say a few things. It's not gonna be in DCSE for an extremely long time. So, no. So in terms of Infinidat, obviously, you're all, very wise people. You're all very familiar with the fact that Lenovo made an acquisition announcement, and that's all going through right now. It's when you do that kind of big acquisition, obviously, there's a lot of government hoops and loops to jump through. And in order to be, compliant with those things, we're not able to put things like the Infinidat systems on our portfolio into DCSE and things like that today. So we would urge you all to go and speak to your Infinidat, team members. And if you've got opportunities there, to raise them there, because that's where we will send you if you ask us. We will make your introductions to the Infinidat team and pass you over to them to handle the opportunity. I'm not saying that we don't want those opportunities because we absolutely do. It's a fantastic opportunity for Lenovo to access and, start attacking in that higher end storage space. I'm just saying for right now, we are not able to jointly go to market. So we have Infinidat doing their thing, Lenovo doing our thing. If there's something, like, the same on their side. If they have an opportunity that's not an Infinidat level product, they'll send it over to us. And if we've got something which is an Infinidat level product, send it over to them. We're all good friends. And Darlene's question there at the end, 4,800. Guess it was a recent launch. Thank you for reminding me exactly when it was. April 2025. There you go. It's really just a case of technology. The technology's moved forwards and, you know, NVMe arrays are now available, that provide way more performance. I mean, I'm not saying that the 4,800 f isn't decent. 900,000 miles out of the platform isn't bad. But that SaaS architecture, you know, drive vendors don't like making SaaS SSDs. I'll say that for free. They do it because they have to, but, really, what... All they wanna do is put out PCI Express based and VIMI SSDs. Makes their lives a lot easier. You know, the SAS chips, you know, those things aren't easy to come by for, you know, the volumes that they need. And so, you know, I don't see them manufacturing SAS SSDs for many more years. Let's put it that way. So I'm expecting the industry to move towards NVMe and, ultimately, newer NVMe technologies. You know, our platform today I'm talking to you about, it's u.2u dot three drives in two and a half inch package. You know, as well as I do that there are new drive packages which are more dense coming down the road, e three dot s and e three dot l. You know, those platform... Those... Sorry. Not platforms. Those drive factors. packages... Those form factors... Thank you, Bevin. Those form factors are really going to drive storage density because whereas I can put 24 SSDs into my package today, Tomorrow, I'll be able to put thirty two forty two lots lots of flash into the, Rob, we have twenty seconds. to go, so we gotta wrap it up quickly. So, that's off, fine. thanks to everyone. Thanks to everyone so much for joining us. Please follow the the survey link and do that for us. Some great sessions coming up. Not gonna have time to go talk you through them, but they're in the handouts. Please have a look at those. Rob spoke about some of the sizing tools and the config tools. We've got deep dives on those. So those are coming up really soon, and that's us. Thanks, everyone. I'm not sure if we are still live or not. If we are still live, let me jump to the next page quickly. There you go. You've jumped for me. Now I've jumped to another. one. I'm sorry. I clicked. I was being too too efficient. There you go. So we meant to be in Veeam next week, but I've just heard we might have to postpone that session. The week after that, for the first time, we're gonna be joined by Kehiza team. We'll care from them about what they're doing on our on our platforms. And then my new session on on the following Thursday, we've got the Nova AI Express. I mentioned it briefly on last week's call. Join us to find out more about that. The more deep dive sessions. So we're up storage sizing deep dive workshops. So four hours of of how to use that tool, get the most out of it. We're gonna do our first on enterprise AI technical workshop for partners. So we'll do a deep dive on that and give some examples on on how to position the enterprise AI offerings. We've then got the advanced administration workshops that get get you get to know about the the features of ONTAP and how to take that, how to take advantage of those. And then a a shorter version which looks at the DS. Alright. So, Rob, help me with the high level positioning of the more store... that's loving storage. And in that enterprise AI technical workshop, I want you to tell me if there's no storage in there because there should be. it's the it's the d adder... D5800. I got the right number, right. no, Kevin. It's a 6,800. 686800. I'm just making sure. for you. Storage sales sure people are paying attention. for you, December. Yeah. There you go. And then cert workshops, we're doing the, storage sales set this quarter. And then there's a brand new data center sales certification exam that is published. So we're gonna run a workshop on... A preparation workshop on that. And at the same time, we'll pick up late November new version of the data center technical cert exam, and we'll bring that at the same time for you. And that just leads us to the last slide, which says, It's a big thank you. you very much. Rob is always very informative and interesting. I'm I'm looking forward to the... I think that ability to to tear... To... Not tear. Sorry. To intermix hear. No. the. No. the... Yes. Naughty word. that's two mis... That's two mistakes. The intermix left. I I like it. So before. I I get myself in more trouble, let me thank everyone, Rob. Thanks as always. And, yeah, thanks to everyone attending. We appreciate your time. Thank you everyone for hanging on there for a couple of minutes. I do appreciate that, and, thanks everyone. Everyone, have a great week. And what... What's left of it? See you on the next call. Great. Thanks a lot. Thanks, everyone. There you go. Done and dusted. We should come off stage, then we went to court. come off stage.