Lenovo today unveiled two new small business servers built on the design principles of the company’s popular ThinkPad laptops and featuring the latest Intel Xeon chips and remote management features.
Both offerings are part of the ThinkServer family and are intended as technology that slots easily into small businesses with little or no IT staff. Andrew Jeffries, worldwide product manager for ThinkServer, said that like the ThinkPad line, Lenovo designed the small business servers to be robust and simple to use.
The ThinkServer TS130 and TS430 are single-socket and dual-socket rack servers, respectively, that Jeffries said were designed to be sleek and have a small footprint to make them ideal for front-office or retail floor deployment but also powerful enough for the back office. Both small business servers boast sophisticated remote manageability features that fit well with the needs of small businesses that use managed service providers (MSPs) for their IT needs. The remote management features allow for remote support, patch management and power on/off.
The TS130 is the new entry-level ThinkServer, replacing the existing TS200V. It will launch later this week with a price starting at $499.
“The TS130 offers a wonderful first-server solution to anyone that has a tiny IT staff or has no IT staff but needs a true server solution,” Jeffries said.
It features the latest Intel Xeon E3-1200 processors, which Intel unveiled in March. Lenovo said the new chips are up to 30 percent faster than previous processors based on the Westmere architecture. The TS130 also features Intel AMT 7.0 manageability tools, up to 4.0TB of internal SATA storage and onboard RAID configurations.
Meanwhile, the TS430 is a new entry in the ThinkServer line intended as a workhorse small business server. It will launch on June 20 in the U.S. and debut in Europe in July. Its price starts at $699.
“The thing that’s going to turn a lot of heads is that $699 price point,” Jeffries said. “Small business customers are really going to love the value and they’re going to love the scalability of this box.”
Like the TS130, the TS430 features the latest Intel Xeon E3-1200 processors. But the TS430 also features redundant, high-efficiency power supplies, up to 16TB of SATA storage or 4.8TB internal SAS storage with up to eight hot swap drives, front-side drive access and a ThinkServer Management Module with available iKVM.