Lenovo has introduced its first server from its newly formed Enterprise Product Group, an Intel Xeon-based box that addresses the SMB market. Lenovo’s ThinkServer TD330 clearly is leveraging the Thinkpad brand, IBM’s popular line of business-class notebooks that Lenovo bought when IBM decided to exit the hardware business. The TD330 is the first server in a family that Lenovo has said previously will extend through the enterprise data center. Lenovo has made the decision to compete on price until it can differentiate itself with some killer technology. The ThinkServer TD330 uses the Intel Xeon E5-2400 processor family, up to 16 cores tied to 192 GB of memory. The entry-level price is $929. Additional options include a variety of hard drive and network cards, RAID, and battery backup and cache. (The TD330 should eventually appear on the company’s Website, but hasn’t yet.) Onboard RAID and diagnostics, hot-swap support and Web-based remote management are all included—useful features for an IT manager, but nothing that a competitor doesn’t supply. It wasn’t immediately clear whether an SSD would be an option. “We’ve placed expanded emphasis on building our server portfolio this year, introducing products that meet the needs of all our customers–from enterprise customers to small businesses,” Guillen wrote in a statement. “The ThinkServer TD330 meets the need of an organization that demands flawless dual socket performance in a flexible, scalable tower solution, and values the reliability and sturdiness that ThinkServer products are known for.” On Oct. 29, Lenovo formed the Enterprise Product Group, expanding Lenovo’s server, storage, networking and software offerings to a variety of commercial customers. The group is based off of a partnership that Lenovo announced with EMC in August. Under the terms of that agreement, Lenovo will sell servers optimized for EMC storage and resell EMC’s storage offerings, as well as work with a newly-fomed EMC-Lenovo joint venture to develop future storage technology. Lenovo hired Roy Guillen from Dell to head the new EPG as its vice president and general manager—a perfect fit, of course, since Dell played much the same role with EMC before deciding to develop its own storage technology. Lenovo’s first server began life in 2008 as essentially an IBM xSeries clone. Since then, Lenovo has released a new tower and then rack-mounted servers in order to keep its toes in the server market. The company currently offers four rack-mounted servers, for example, including the RD330 and RD430, which uses up to two Intel Xeon E5-2470 processors and retails for $1,973.00 and up. The TD330 continues to offer Lenovo’s management tools, including its EasyStartup, EasyUpdate and EasyManage software. Lenovo also offers a management module premium with iKVM, allowing IT staff to monitor and control the server from any location. [caption id="attachment_5711" align="aligncenter" width="445"] Lenovo hopes that businesses will replace any older servers (such as the Lenovo model shown here) with the TD330.[/caption] Image: Lenovo