VeeamON 2025 – Day 2 Recap: BBQ, Edge Servers & Immutable Storage
Kansas City BBQ and Top Gun Vibes
Day 2 kicked off not just with tech but with a taste of San Diego culture. I took a lunch break at Kansas City Barbeque – famously known as the “Top Gun bar” where scenes from the 1986 movie were filmed. The place oozes nostalgia with Top Gun memorabilia around, and the food was just what I needed. I indulged in some delicious pulled pork and brisket burnt ends, which were fantastic. Nothing like smoky BBQ goodness to recharge in the middle of a conference day! It was a fun little detour and gave me a story to tell (because how often do you get to eat at a film location of an 80s classic?). With my belly complete and spirits high, I headed back to VeeamON, ready for the tech action in the afternoon.
Exploring the Expo Hall
Back at the conference, the Expo Hall was buzzing with energy. Picture a vast space filled with booths, demos, and tech enthusiasts geeking out over the latest gear. I wandered around, coffee in hand, checking out some of the coolest hardware on display. Two pieces of kit caught my eye today – one from Lenovo and one from HPE. Below are the highlights, which I’ll keep fairly casual (this is a blog recap after all!), but trust me, these are seriously cool innovations.
Lenovo ThinkEdge SE100 – Tiny Box, Big Edge Power
Lenovo’s new ThinkEdge SE100 server looks like a mini powerhouse for edge computing. Don’t let its small, sealed form factor fool you – this thing is built tough. At the Lenovo booth, they had one mounted on a wall like telco equipment, underscoring its deployment’s flexibility. The SE100 can be hung on a wall or ceiling, plunked on a desk, or slipped into a rack, and it’s designed to handle harsh conditions (it’s rated to run in 5–45°C temps and withstand dusty, vibrating environments)lenovopress.lenovo.com. That rugged, compact design is perfect for factories, remote sites, or any edge deployment where you need server power outside a traditional data center.
What’s impressive is how much tech Lenovo packed into this little box. They were touting it as 85% smaller than a typical 1U edge server while delivering serious performance. It’s powered by Intel Core Ultra processors (6 or 8 performance cores), and even supports adding a low-profile GPU for AI tasks. The folks at the booth explained that it’s “AI-ready” – meaning you can do real-time inferencing, video analytics, object detection, and all that fun stuff right at the edge, without needing a cloud round trip. For a retail store, a remote oil rig, or a bright factory floor, that’s a big deal. Essentially, it brings enterprise AI capability to wherever your data is generated.
Regarding connectivity, the ThinkEdge SE100 has dual 1 Gbe network ports onboard (plus a dedicated management port). If you need more bandwidth, there’s an expansion option: the chassis has PCIe slots to add adapters (Lenovo hinted at options for 10Gb or even 25Gb networking via an add-on card). So, you can start with the base 1GbE for simple setups and later upgrade to faster links as needed – pretty handy for “grow as you go” deployments. The unit I saw was fanless and whisper-quiet, and since it’s sealed up nicely, it won’t ingest dust bunnies on an industrial site. Mobility was another theme – at ~2 litres in size, you could carry it in one hand to deploy on a remote site. It’s like the Swiss Army knife of edge servers: small, tough, and versatile.
Lenovo also emphasized security features, which matter for edge boxes that might sit in semi-public areas. The SE100 has ThinkShield security built in – things like encrypted storage, secure BIOS, and even physical intrusion detection. In short, it’s not just an Iot toy; it’s a full-fledged server with the trimmings. From what I gathered, this device is ideal for Azure Stack Edge/Local scenarios or any setup where you need to run Azure services on-prem at the edge. Overall, I walked away impressed – the ThinkEdge SE100 is a tiny box that packs a big punch for edge computing and AI inference at remote locations—one of the coolest gadgets I’ve seen here.
HPE Alletra 4120 – Hardened Backup Beast in 2u
Next, I swung by the HPE booth and checked out their storage server on display, the HPE Alletra 4120 (part of HPE’s new Alletra 4000 series). If the Lenovo SE100 is a tiny edge device, the Alletra 4120 is almost the opposite – a big, robust storage workhorse designed for enterprise backup. This is built to be a Veeam “Hardened Repository” appliance, perfect for secure, ransomware-proof backups. As a backup nerd, I was pretty excited about this one.
Physically, the Alletra 4120 is a 2u rackmount server that can house up to 24 large hard drives (3.5″ spinning disks) in the front – two bays of 12 drives each side by side. That’s a ton of capacity in just 2u of rack space! They mentioned there’s also an option to add some rear drives or SSDS, but the base config with 24 x high-capacity HDDS is already a monster. Someone at the booth said you could get half a petabyte (or more) raw capacity in one box if you use 20TB drives. For any high-capacity backup scenarios (think extensive archives or big datasets), the 4120 has you covered.
What makes the Alletra 4120 particularly cool for Veeam users because it’s pre-configured as a hardened, immutable storage appliance. It runs a hardened Linux setup in plain English where backup files can be made immutable (locked against deletion or modification for a set period). This is a best-practice defence against ransomware – even if some malware got in, it couldn’t wipe out your backups easily. HPE and Veeam have been working together; they described the Alletra 4120 as validated for Veeam’s “Secure Backup” architecture. It can serve as a dedicated Linux backup repository with all the security bells and whistles (think of things like Linux immutability, disabled root access, etc., all set up out of the box). HPE’s documentation notes that these Alletra servers can be used as hardened Linux repos to provide “heightened security against ransomware attacks”. So it’s an immutable backup vault in a single appliance.
From a performance standpoint, the Alletra 4120 isn’t just about capacity; it has dual Intel Xeon Scalable processors, plenty of RAM under the hood, and support for hardware RAID controllers. That means it can handle heavy ingest loads, useful when pumping tons of backup data each night. They have a bigger brother, the Alletra 4140, a 4u beast that holds up to 68 or 92 drives (!). But for most, the 2u 4120 model hits the sweet spot between capacity and space efficiency. It’s also more than capable of saturating network links during backup or restore – I overheard that these systems were not the bottleneck even at very high throughput levels in testing.
In the context of VeeamON, the message was clear: if you need a secure, scalable backup repository, HPE’s got solutions. The Alletra 4120 comes Veeam-ready – essentially, plug it in, load up your Linux of choice (it might even come with one pre-installed/configured by HPE), point your Veeam Backup & Replication to it, and you’ve got a fortress for your backups. Given the rise of ransomware, having backups on an immutable system is almost a no-brainer now, and it’s nice to see vendors teaming up to offer turnkey approaches. Plus, HPE offers their systems via GreenLake, so you can consume this as a service if buying outright isn’t your thing.
Final Thoughts on Day 2
All in all, Day 2 at VeeamON 2025 was a blast. From chowing down on the famous BBQ to geeking out over new hardware, it perfectly balanced fun and tech. The Lenovo ThinkEdge SE100 showed me that edge computing gear can be ultra-compact and powerful, bringing AI to the field in a rugged package. Meanwhile, HPE’s Alletra 4120 drove home the importance of secure backups, proving that even in 2025, “tape is great but immutable disk is better” (my cheesy takeaway).
As I wrap up the day, I feel well-fed and well-informed. Can’t ask for more! Looking forward to Day 3 tomorrow – but first, I might re-watch Top Gun at the hotel for old times’ sake. Until next time!
Dave Kawula – Microsoft MVP / Veeam Vanguard
