Lenovo Unveils Dual-Core Servers

Best known for its notebooks, Lenovo today is rolling out three new servers that bring new levels of management functionality to a class of servers associated with branch offices to small to medium business sites.

Priced starting under $900, the RD230, RD240 and TD230 ThinkServer systems are the company’s first dual-processor offerings. According to Kumar Majety, director of ThinkServer marketing, Lenovo intends to compete more aggressively against Dell and Hewlett-Packard by bundling more remote management tools into this class of servers.

Majety says that rivals tend to reserve their management tools for deployment on higher-end servers. But Majety says SMB and remote branch offices that are typically short-staffed need this kind of functionality most.

Based on Intel 5500 and 5600 processors, this new ThinkServer includes hot-swappable drives and, in the case of the RD230, RAID functionality.

The servers, said Majety, are 60 percent faster than previous ThinkServer offerings in this category and like most new servers, wind up being less expensive to buy than it is to maintain and run previous generations of servers that are based on less energy-efficient Intel processors.

The new ThinkServers also support both Intel vPro and LanDesk systems management software. Majety said that capability is especially valuable for IT organizations deploying Lenovo notebooks and desktops alongside ThinkServer systems.