Lenovo Storage Announcements

The Six Five team discusses Lenovo’s storage announcements.

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Transcript:

Patrick Moorhead: So people have been seeing Lenovo’s prowess in their data center business, led by Kirk Skagen, but most of the focus has been around a compute, where they’re driving revenue and gaining market share. But little do people know that Lenovo actually has a very large storage business and growing. And what I thought was interesting is that they are, literally, the number one storage market share under $25,000 and that’s 61% of the market.

So you’re going to drive some big numbers and that does include things like JBOD and stuff like that. It’s not necessarily NAS and SAN, but their higher level systems have some growth too. They saw 22% growth in the mid-range which, by the way, that is an area that Dell Technologies takes super seriously. All-Flash had over a hundred percent year-on-year growth, but overall, they’re the number five storage player on the planet, which has to wake people up, has to surprise people and know this isn’t a China/Asia thing. This is very well distributed across the world.

And the third thing that they brought out was TruScale. They give a number for growth, which was 600% year-on-year. I don’t know what the number is. My assumption is that in comparison to their overall data center number, it’s low, but it’s good to see them come out and disclose the growth. So Matt Kimball, newly appointed Storage Analyst, will be doing the write-up on its new high density JBOD closure and also ransomware protection updates that they brought to their suite. But hats off to Kirk and team there. Not only are you driving it in compute but also driving it in storage.

Daniel Newman: The success story continued and I continue to believe that the company has the ability to grow across the infrastructure domain because, one, it’s willing to take chances; two, it continues to link together its big portfolio, its global reach, its very robust supply chains. And it’s also been able to really defy sort of the relationship it has as being tied to China. And I think that’s because it’s handled and looped in the right messaging around its security and its ability to be a good partner to government. I know that it’s got some FedRAMP approvals lately, and these things are all really important to notate, Pat. The storage opportunity is really significant. I believe it’s so significant that I went out and bought one of the largest analyst firms that was dedicated and focused on this particular domain. And the opportunity for it to grow and continue to grow in this space is very lucrative.

We’ve talked over the last few weeks about the growth of Pure Storage. We’ve talked over the last several years about the stronghold that Dell has on the market. But, look, there’s a correlation that is going to be very symbiotic, I would even say, between storage and compute, and all of this rapid growth and onset of Generative AI is going to be so infrastructure-intensive that companies that are supplying infrastructure have a huge growth opportunity, cloud scale, enterprise scale. And, of course, Lenovo has shown with its work in compute, it can accomplish this. So I have no doubt given the relationship that exists between compute and storage, that Lenovo’s in a really good place here, Pat.

So you hit a lot of the high notes. I don’t think I need to dwell too much here, but Kirk Skagen and team continue to do a really good job. Your tweet was definitive. Good data in it. Hope it gets a little bit more attention. I’m going to retweet it right now. And, like I said, I think Lenovo is going to be one to continue to watch.

Patrick Moorhead: Good stuff. In fact, I believe that compute and storage are so interlocked that I combined swim lanes under Matt, so I am all in on that.