OREANDA-NEWS. Lenovo announced, at the EDUCAUSE annual conference here, two new performance-optimized rack servers, the ThinkServer RD540 and ThinkServer RD640. Armed with the latest Intel(r) Xeon E5 processors, these highly efficient and flexible servers are designed for easy integration into existing IT infrastructures that handle demanding virtualization, cloud and compute-intensive workloads.

Lenovo's ThinkServer RD540 and RD640 are an ideal choice for educational institutions seeking affordable options that pack a punch. The RD540 and RD640 provide the performance, security and reliability needed to support large university workloads and operations. When optionally equipped with Stoneware's webNetwork software, school administrators, students and staff can access data, applications and services from a multitude of devices and platforms using just a browser.With low price points, built-in redundancy, high reliability components and sophisticated cooling technology, the RD540 and RD640 deliver outstanding value for higher education.

With high-performance hardware RAID for data protection, web-enabled remote management and a powerful, easy-to-use management tool suite all offered as standard equipment, the budget-friendly RD540 and RD640 provide uncompromising performance ideal for scale-out data analytics, virtualized business workloads, and compute intensive applications.

The ThinkServer RD540 and RD640 rack servers come equipped with up to 320GB memory and the latest Intel(r) Xeon E5-2600 v2 processors, which offer impressive compute power-per-watt -- up to 24 cores -- delivering 27 percent faster performance than the previous generation award winning RD servers. Both of these servers feature balanced design, flexible configurations and expansive I/O to handle demanding deployments. Powerful new network adapter, storage controller and sophisticated RAID choices increase scalability, reliability and input/output (I/O) capacity to handle growing requirements for large and compute intensive scale-out applications. RAID options from LSI(r) include the ThinkServer RAID 710 adapter with 1GB write-back cache and available LSI(r) MegaRAID CacheCade Pro 2.0 and Fastpath for outstanding reliability and IOPs performance.

Available in either 1U (RD540) or 2U (RD640) configurations with included tool-less rail kits for easy installation, both of these new ThinkServers are based on open standards and management protocols and fit seamlessly into any hybrid network environment. Innovative Lenovo Smart Grid power management technology uses Intel Node Manager(r) to scale power management to the data center level, simultaneously managing as many as 1,000 server nodes. Smart Grid can be used at each level of the data center hierarchy-rack, row, room or group-to provide IT policy-based, power management that increases server utilization while significantly lowering energy consumption and operating costs.

The Lenovo ThinkServer(r) RD540 server supports flexible configurations including 16TB hard disk capacity and new I/O expansion choices to handle business analytics, web server or virtualized workloads. The RD540 delivers highly efficient performance with 80PLUS Gold power supplies and low volt memory choices.

ThinkServer RD640 features enormous I/O expansion with an additional PCIe slot and 32TB storage capacity for the most demanding cloud, compute or virtualization deployments. The RD640 is ideal for business process or decision support deployments that demand rich performance, flexible system configurations and an optimized mix of storage and memory.