Juniper is getting in on all the hyperconverged data center action, announcing today a partnership with Lenovo.

Lenovo contributes its x86 servers and storage to the partnership, and Juniper brings its networking portfolio including its software-defined networking (SDN) expertise via Contrail.

The arrangement gives Lenovo the ability to resell Juniper’s networking. “We are not going to be reselling their equipment,” says Mike Marcellin, chief marketing officer at Juniper. “We are giving them robust networking, data center switching, and our routing and security portfolio, wrapped in SDN capabilities with Contrail.”

There has been a flurry of hypercoverged data center news lately from vendors, including Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Ericsson, and VMware/EMC.

Marcellin says Juniper was eyeing this space last fall when a number of regional, value-added resellers selected its MetaFabric and Contrail products for their converged stacks to help customers deploy data center and cloud networks.

Converged infrastructure pools compute, network, and storage resources, according to SDxCentral’s “Future of the Converged Data Center Report.”  Hyperconverged infrastructure takes the concept further by making the pieces modular, so that users can add more storage without adding compute, for example.

“The distinction I draw is that hyperconverged starts to look at applications a given enterprise wants to run and starts to optimize for those applications,” says Marcellin. “Lenovo needed a networking solution to round that out.”

The two companies intend to use the Open Network Install Environment (ONIE) model, which lets a customer boot an arbitrary operating system onto switch hardware.

Juniper and Lenovo are targeting enterprise and service provider customers as well as channel partners and system integrators around the world. But Lenovo is a Chinese company, so “This gives us a local lead partner [in China],” notes Marcellin.