Resellers and managed service providers can now kit out data centres with a converged stack from Lenovo after the Chinese manufacturer signed an OEM deal with networking vendor Brocade.
The pair announced the tie-up earlier this week, with Brocade SAN fabrics providing networking combined with Lenovo x86 servers and S2200 and S3200 SAN storage arrays.
The deal allows Lenovo's channel partners around the world to sell Brocade's Gen 5 fibre channel SAN switch technology.
Avnet will push the converged systems in Australia, as Brocade's exclusive Australian distributor and a strong Lenovo partner – Avnet is IBM's biggest global distie and took on Lenovo after the Chinese vendor bought IBM's System X division.
Brocade's switches have completed qualification testing for "seamless interoperability" with Lenovo's storage products.
The deal gives Lenovo a new weapon in the data centre, where it will compete against Cisco, whose converged play centres on its Unified Computing System (UCS) and Nexus switches. combined with storage partnerships with the likes of NetApp and EMC.
Lenovo is trying to grow it reputation as an enterprise data centre vendor following its acquisition of IBM's x86 commodity server division.
One Australian Brocade partner, who asked not to be named, told CRN: "Lenovo are just doing what everyone else does; if they want to be a player in the data centre, they need a SAN switch."
Brocade has aligned closely with EMC for the past 15 years, a relationship that should only get tighter as Cisco feuds with VMware – an EMC Federation company – in the software-defined networking sphere.
The increasingly unhappy marriage has seen Cisco heavily dilute its stake in VCE, the joint venture it formed with EMC and VMware.
According to Avnet, the Lenovo-Brocade combination is suited to "solution-focussed workloads such as server consolidation and data centres, VDI, testing and development, and backup and disaster recovery".
The distie will target systems integrators selling into the data centre space, as well as managed service providers fitting out their own private cloud.
Avnet is currently running three offers to help persuade channel partners to deploy Lenovo enterprise hardware.
Nathan Lowe, general manager of ASI Solutions, told CRN: "It can only complement us, with ASI being a very strong Lenovo partner and very strong Brocade partner, and a partner with EMC. The integration between the three will be very seamless and efficient."
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