Building a smarter, more sustainable future with Lenovo

A smart and sustainable future requires more than just new and efficient technology. It needs a holistic approach to examine a problem, evaluating existing systems to reduce waste and investing in solutions for longer term impact.

It is for this reason that Lenovo turned its eyes towards data centres, those vast computing installations that support and power today’s world, as well as its future. Another avenue Lenovo has decided to explore is smarter workplace solutions as a means of supporting a collaborative and efficient workforce.

Data centres are everywhere, consuming around 2% of the electricity that the world produces, and demand is only growing. Lenovo’s work on Neptune — a patented design that uses liquid cooling to efficiently extract heat from data centres — is a smart innovation that has already been deployed. Neptune is based on several technologies, including DTN (direct-to-node) warm-water cooling, rear-door heat exchangers, and thermal transfer modules. A few years ago, Lenovo managed to pair this technology with modern, and even more power-hungry graphics processing units (GPUs), allowing for new-age, thermally efficient data centres and high-performance computing (HPC) clusters.

Higher thermal efficiency doesn’t just mean less waste heat, it also means that components can run faster for longer, thus allowing more work to be accomplished in a shorter time and greater efficiency. Case in point: Dreamworks Animation, which upgraded to these greener Neptune clusters and saw an immediate, 20% performance increase. For a company that typically spends 300 million computational hours on each movie, this upgrade is significant.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have the corporate world that thrives on the effectiveness of communication and the efficiency of decision making. Lenovo’s collaborative solutions make this happen. Advanced analytics, thanks to smarter data centres, helps leaders identify opportunities for competitive differentiation, while sustainable design keeps environmental targets within reach.

Lenovo’s collaboration tools are helping create better employee experiences by enabling increased agility and engagement. Thanks to such solutions, we’re being ushered towards a world where fully remote workplaces are not only possible, but also more productive and sustainable than a traditional, office-bound workplace.

Building such a future starts with the very fundamentals. Human-centric design, a deep understanding of the technological building blocks employed, and a culture of innovation and out-of-the-box thinking are where it starts. This is something that Lenovo understands very well, as is evident from its rich history of innovation and the partnerships it cultivates.

These solutions aren’t just unlocking new capabilities and efficiencies, in fact they are helping build a better world for us and for the generations to come.