July 08, 2021, Cambridge, England — Sunlight.io, the edge infrastructure company, today announced that it has certified Lenovo’s compact edge compute server — the ThinkSystem SE350 — for use with Sunlight’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) stack for data-intensive applications at the edge, such as IoT and AI.
The rise in use of applications such as AI and IoT often requires decisions to be made in real time, close to the source. For example, adjusting blade pitch on a wind turbine in response to changing wind conditions, or spotting and picking a defective component off a conveyor belt on the factory floor. These use cases require fast time to decision, in environments that are far from ideal – often with limited space and power and intermittent connectivity.
Lenovo has responded to these requirements with its workhorse, the ThinkSystem SE350. The SE350 offers smart connectivity, security, and manageability for workloads running in harsh environments. Coupled with Sunlight’s HCI, it is the ideal platform for deploying multi-tenant VM-based and cloud-native applications with high availability, high performance and centralised management at low cost.
Lenovo and Sunlight conducted certification testing on the SE350 in Lenovo’s demo lab in Stuttgart. The testing not only proved full system compatibility, but also:
- The complete Sunlight HCI stack can be installed on the SE350 in under an hour
- Sunlight memory overhead was less than 5% of total system resources – leaving maximum capacity for applications
- Storage performance available to virtual machines was nearly 2M IOPS across a two node cluster
Test results, configurations and methodology can be found at performance.sunlight.io.
Lenovo’s Business Development DACH, Florian Pawletta said: “We created the ThinkSystem SE350 to be small and rugged enough to run anywhere – it can even be hung on the wall of a smart factory – without compromising on performance. We’re delighted to have assisted Sunlight in certifying the SE350. Our customers are increasingly looking for ways to simplify their edge architectures – and Sunlight plus SE350 offers a great way to do that.”
Sunlight’s founder and CEO, Julian Chesterfield said: “The Lenovo SE350 is a powerful multi-purpose edge device. We showed that running it with Sunlight allows multiple applications to be run with high availability, full isolation and access to millions of IOPS of storage performance – all in a 2 node cluster. That’s not possible with regular data center hyperconverged solutions as they take up most of an edge cluster’s resources just to boot – let alone run applications.”
About Sunlight
Sunlight makes performance possible anywhere – from the cloud to the edge. Sunlight’s HCI stack makes applications like AI, Big Data, Analytics and Rendering run 3x faster compared to legacy virtualization, and because Sunlight has a tiny footprint, it’s perfect for the edge. Enterprises and MSPs use Sunlight to cut the costs of delivering high performance IT by 70%. Find out more at https://sunlight.io.
