Lenovo boosted its Microsoft ties as well as its larger edge-to-cloud play with an edge platform that runs Microsoft Azure Stack hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).

The Lenovo ThinkAgile MX1021 reduces latency and analyzes data where it’s produced. It also combines with Microsoft Azure Stack Hub and Azure IoT Hub, allowing customers to tier and move data between the edge, their on-premises data centers running Microsoft’s HCI stack, and Azure cloud.

Kamran Amini, VP and GM of server, storage, and software-defined infrastructure at Lenovo Data Center Group, says while some of its competitors “take their general-purpose sever products,” run HCI software on top, and call it an edge platform, “we’re talking about a true edge device that delivers you enterprise-class capabilities, reliability, and security.”

Lenovo’s ThinkAgile platform is a ruggedized, compact server that provides a variety of different connectivity options including 10-gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, and LTE, Amini said. It also includes GPU accelerators for data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) at the edge as well as data encryption for security. “So when we talk about true edge, that is true edge,” he said. “You see our competitors taking, for example, a traditional pizza box rack sever, tagging it with HCI, and rebranding it as an edge server.”

Additionally, as more of its customers adopt HCI in their core data centers, “they want to extend those lessons learned with the HCI stack to the edge,” Amini said. Because Lenovo integrates Microsoft Azure Stack HCI, the new edge platform allows companies to do this. “With Microsoft, it provides customers the ability to take that device, and extend it to the public cloud and edge seamlessly.”

And, as more customer move compute to edge environments, “you will see future announcements that will expand us beyond Microsoft to other partners in our industry,” Amini said.

Also today Lenovo announced its ThinkSystem DM7100 all-flash and hybrid-flash storage systems. These use end-to-end NVMe technology, which allows customers to perform data analytics about 30% faster and data consolidation about 66% faster compared to traditional solid state drives, Amini said.

These new systems also integrate with several public clouds — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, and Google Cloud — for hybrid cloud storage. This means customers can run “hot data,” which they need to access frequently, on premises, while tiering cold data to the public cloud for less expensive storage.

Both the new edge platform and the storage systems are also available through Lenovo TruScale, which is the vendor’s pay-per-use data center model.