Lenovo Announces 42 World Record Performance Benchmarks for New ThinkSystem Server Portfolio

Unmatched reliability, customer satisfaction and engineering innovation for x86 servers

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. and BROOKLYN, N.Y. – July 11, 2017 – Lenovo (HKSE:992) today announced 42 new world record benchmarks for the ThinkSystem server portfolio, integrated with the latest Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, according to industry leading benchmark organizations^A. The ThinkSystem portfolio of solutions is engineered to help customers reduce complexity and tackle their most challenging workloads.

The new ThinkSystem portfolio brings the gold-standard for the industry under a single unified brand spanning servers, storage and networking systems. The ThinkSystem portfolio can adapt to changing IT needs while reducing complexity and cost. Lenovo’s latest server portfolio includes 14 highly configurable servers across rack and tower, mission critical, dense and blade platforms, as well as new hyperscale system designs, all of which streamline IT infrastructure and lead to increased service levels in the data center that tie directly to business growth. Additionally, customers can choose between different technologies and scale technology as workloads change. Lenovo engineered the ThinkSystem portfolio to work seamlessly with an organization’s previous investments, without the need to completely re-architect the data center.

Lenovo has added seven new solutions covering cloud, big data, analytics and database that are supported on the new ThinkSystem servers, as well as introducing two new Intel® solutions. These enterprise solutions are designed to deliver value to customers by utilizing Lenovo’s innovations in server performance and reliability as well as collaboration with industry-leading software partners.

Performance Unlocked: ThinkSystem Achieves 42 #1 Performance Benchmarks
In addition to reducing complexity and streamlining operations, today’s customers are increasingly looking for more from their investments and require confidence in their technology partner to deliver the type of performance and availability necessary to run demanding and evolving workloads like Microsoft SQL Server. Building on its longstanding recognition as the #1 x86 server vendor for reliability and customer satisfaction¹, Lenovo’s new ThinkSystem servers have achieved 42 #1 performance world records.

The TPC-E benchmark uses a database to model a brokerage firm with customers who generate online transaction processing (OLTP) transactions related to trades, account inquiries, and market research. Lenovo is the first to break the $100 USD/transaction per second per E benchmark (tpsE) price barrier on TPC-E, with $93.48 USD/tpsE², 16% lower than the previous low of $111.65 USD/tpsE³. In addition to Lenovo achieving the lowest $USD/tpsE, Lenovo also achieved the highest TPC-E performance for any 2-socket system with 6,598.36 tpsE². This benchmark shows how customers can lower their overall costs, while still achieving the performance required to process their customer transactions. In addition to the TPC-E WR’s on the SR650, Lenovo also achieved a TPC-H world record on the SR950. The TPC Benchmark™H (TPC-H) is a decision support benchmark. This benchmark illustrates decision support systems that examine large volumes of data, execute queries with a high degree of complexity, and give answers to critical business questions. Lenovo has published the best performance result ever on the non-clustered TPC-H™ benchmark @10,000GB scale. The ThinkSystem SR950 server achieved the following score: 1,336,109.6 QphH™ @10,000GB (queries per hour H) at $0.92 USD / QphH @10,000GB^8.

Lenovo has also demonstrated success to aid financial market customers, delivering 26 STAC-M3 world record benchmarks on the ThinkSystem SR950 and ThinkSystem SR650. The STAC-M3 benchmarks measure challenging workloads in time-series analytics. The ThinkSystem SR950 set world records in 9 of the 15 required, and two of the optional STAC-M3 ‘big-memory’ Shasta benchmarks. One of these results was over 2x higher than prior scores in the STAC-M3 Shasta benchmark⁴.

The ThinkSystem SR650 also set world records in 15 of 17 mean response-time benchmarks when running the STAC-M3 Antuco benchmark suite, compared to previous publicly reported results for single-node 2 socket servers running the Kx Systems kdb+ database⁷. The STAC-M3 benchmark reports for the SR950 and SR650 are publicly available. The Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 has set a new single node 2-socket performance world record with the SPECmpiM_base2007 metric from the MPI M2007 suite of the SPEC MPI 2007 Benchmark⁹.

In addition, Lenovo set world record world records in SPECvirt_sc2013⁵ in 2 socket server, and SPECjbb2015⁶ benchmarks on 1, 2, 4, and 8 socket servers. These new world record benchmark results demonstrate Lenovo’s commitment in delivering the performance our customers expect from their server investments, in addition to providing customers flexible systems that are highly reliable.

“Today’s announcement reconfirms Lenovo’s commitment to disrupting the legacy status quo and providing unprecedented investment protection for customers,” said Kirk Skaugen, President of Lenovo Data Center Group. “Lenovo’s 42 new world breaking benchmarks for our new ThinkSystem servers utilizes the latest Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, combined with third parties rating Lenovo as the #1 x86 server system reliability and customer satisfaction, showcases Lenovo’s engineering strength and more importantly our global commitment to exceed customer expectations.”

Lenovo Collaborates with Intel to Delivery Intel® Select Solutions
Lenovo also announced today support for Intel Select Solutions, a new set of optimized solutions based on the Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors targeting today’s complex data center workloads. These solutions offer customers an industry-standard solution while simplifying and accelerating the process of selecting, deploying, and optimizing data center infrastructure to run specific workloads. The Lenovo Validated Design for VMWare vSAN and Lenovo Database Validated Designs for High Performance Microsoft SQL Server OLTP will be available starting in October 2017.

Additional Quote
“The Lenovo ThinkSystem server portfolio delivers 42 new world record benchmarks. Today’s results are an excellent testament to Lenovo’s ThinkSystem server innovation and technology design,” said Kim Stevenson, Senior Vice President, Data Center Infrastructure Business at Lenovo. “The sheer number and the diversity of these benchmarks demonstrate Lenovo’s commitment to innovation and drives business value for our customers, allowing them to run the most demanding workloads and applications.”

About STAC
The Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC) is a company that coordinates a community called the STAC Benchmark Council. The STAC Benchmark Council consists of over 300 financial institutions and more than 50 vendor organizations whose purpose is to explore technical challenges and solutions in financial services and to develop technology benchmark standards that are useful to financial organizations. User firms include the largest global banks, brokerage houses, exchanges, hedge funds, proprietary trading shops, and other market participants. Vendor firms include innovative manufacturers of processor, server, storage, and network hardware, as well as horizontal-market software providers and vertical specialists. STAC-M3 benchmarks are governed by user firms in the STAC Benchmark Council. The STAC-M3 benchmark report for the SR950 is publicly available.

About TPC.ORG
The TPC is a non-profit corporation founded to define transaction processing and database benchmarks and to disseminate objective, verifiable TPC performance data to the industry.

Additional Resources
For more information about Lenovo’s ThinkSystem server performance and benchmark results, visit http://lenovopress.com/LP0698.

Results referenced are current as of July 11, 2017. To view all TPC results, visit http://www.tpc.org. The total solution availability for this TPC-E* benchmark result is October 19, 2017. See the details for this result http://www.tpc.org/4080.

Additional details for each of the ThinkSystem servers included in today’s announcement are available here.

About Lenovo
Lenovo (HKSE: 992) (ADR: LNVGY) is a $43 billion global Fortune 500 company and a leader in providing innovative consumer, commercial, and enterprise technology. Our portfolio of high-quality, secure products and services covers PCs (including the legendary Think and multimode Yoga brands), workstations, servers, storage, smart TVs and a family of mobile products like smartphones (including the Motorola brand), tablets and apps. Join us on LinkedIn, follow us on Facebook or Twitter (@Lenovo) or visit us at www.lenovo.com.

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Footnotes
^Awww.tpc.org, www.spec.org, and www.stacresearch.com
¹ 2H16 Corporate IT Buying Behavior and Customer Satisfaction Study, TBR; December; 016. 22016-2017 Global Hardware, Server OS Reliability Report, ITIC; October 2016.3 IDC, Digital Transformation: Impact on the Datacenter — Are You Ready? Doc # DR2017_T4_LD
²http://www.tpc.org/4080
³http://www.tpc.org/4077
⁴STAC-M3.β1.1T.YRHIBID/s.TIME benchmark on x86 4 socket servers
⁵https://www.spec.org/virt_sc2013/results/res2017q3/virt_sc2013-20170620-00089-perf.html
⁶ https://www.spec.org/jbb2015/results/res2017q3/
⁷SR950 – https://stacresearch.com/KDB170629
SR650 – https://stacresearch.com/KDB170703
⁸http://www.tpc.org/3328
⁹https://www.spec.org/mpi2007/results/res2017q3/mpi2007-20170620-00534.html