Lenovo’s Blockbuster Plan To Acquire Infinidat: 7 Things To Know

Lenovo’s surprise plan to acquire Infinidat, unveiled Thursday, represents a major shift in the storage industry. Lenovo competes with archrivals Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell across the data center infrastructure landscape, particularly in entry-level to enterprise servers, but has not been able to take advantage of its high-end server business to be a significant player in enterprise storage.

Lenovo’s planned acquisition of Infinidat, when it closes as expected sometime this year, changes all that.

Infinidat will bring Lenovo not just one of the storage industry’s highest performance storage technologies, but also technology aimed at making data readily available for use in AI workloads.

[Related: Storage 100: The Digital Bridge Between The Cloud And On-Premises Worlds]

That technology will make Lenovo a much stronger data center competitor, said Stuart McRae, executive director and general manager for Lenovo’s storage division.

“From our compute side, we scale from everywhere from small edge systems all the way up to multi-GPU systems,” McRae told CRN. “But we did not have a solution in the high-performance block analytics storage space to match with our compute and to complement all the rest of the storage we have today. This is an investment in our IP to deliver complete, differentiated solutions for customers.”

The acquisition will make Lenovo a top storage technology developer across the gamut of high-end enterprise storage, said Infinidat CMO Eric Herzog.

“Infinidat is a high-end storage play, but it’s anything in the high-end storage space, from primary storage, secondary storage, backup, disaster recovery,” Herzog told CRN. “As long as it’s high-end storage, we fit in that space.”

Neither McRae nor Herzog would discuss details such as the purchase price of the acquisition or how the deal was made. But they did address multiple issues related to what could be one of the key storage acquisitions for 2025.

For more about why this is such an important acquisition for both Lenovo and Infinidat, read more from CRN’s conversation with McRae and Herzog, which has been edited for clarity.

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