Lenovo and Scale Computing announced a global partnership and a new joint product providing a solution for edge infrastructure for global retailers, distributed enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses.
“In today's global economy, businesses and governments are instrumenting the edge with ever greater intelligence, so the desire for reliable, scalable and agile edge infrastructure solutions continues to grow,” said Wilfredo Sotolongo, Vice President and General Manager of IoT at Lenovo Data Center Group. “Together with Scale Computing, Lenovo is addressing this market by providing edge infrastructure that has the capacity to run various IT and OT workloads, is space conscious and can be managed at each individual location by generalists. This reduces the time and budget spent managing technology and allows companies to focus more on growing their business and serving their customers.”
The solution is ideal for highly distributed, on-premise environments, such as retail stores or bank branches, with multiple locations managed by the enterprise from a central location. Lenovo's broad range of servers combined with efficient, intelligent edge infrastructure software from Scale Computing deliver a simple, self-healing, highly-available platform for running applications at the edge or hybrid edge-and-cloud. The Scale Computing HC3 Edge Platform on Lenovo Servers replaces traditional complex and expensive on-premise infrastructure with a modern solution optimized for environments where application uptime is critical, yet on-premise IT resources are highly limited.
Among the growing customer base that have chosen the Lenovo and Scale Computing edge infrastructure solution for their IT needs is Ahold Delhaize, an international food retail group headquartered in Zaandam, Netherlands. The company operates supermarkets and e-commerce businesses across 35 brands, 6,600+ stores, 369,000+ employees and 11 countries, serving over 50 million customers each week.
With a large multi-national retail operation, Ahold Delhaize wanted to reduce time spent deploying and managing edge IT infrastructure and needed a solution that could host traditional and IoT applications on the same hardware. They ultimately chose the Lenovo-Scale solution and have deployed it in 800 stores in Belgium, with more planned in 2019.
“We extensively evaluated the market and wanted to take the time to ensure any new IT environment could effectively support our applications and future demands. We continually look to deliver exceptional customer service internationally and edge computing has a critical role to play in supporting this,” said Rolf Vanden Eynde, Head of Infrastructure innovation at Ahold Delhaize. “The Scale Computing HC3 software, in combination with Lenovo servers and switches, delivered the stability, support and simplicity we needed. The solution outclassed competition on a total cost of ownership and simplicity.”
