Nathu La marks a pivotal step in Zoho Corp.’s journey towards building its full technology stack — from the hardware layer to software applications.
With Nathu La, Zoho has achieved equivalent performance with 12-18 per cent lower power consumption and a 20-30 per cent lower total cost of ownership (TCO), the company said. The research and development (R&D) work was carried out in Nagpur by local talent recruited and trained by Zoho. The Nathu La server, comprising Intel Xeon 6 processors, was developed in collaboration with Intel, leveraging its enablement capabilities and technical expertise.
"We are proud to build a server system that is truly designed in India and to take a step towards creating sovereign technology," said Shailesh Davey, chief executive officer (CEO), Zoho Corp. "The development of the Nathu La server reflects our commitment to creating complex technology powered by talent from smaller towns and villages. Through focused investments in R&D and skill development, this foray into hardware enables us not only to build and own the technology, but also to cultivate the expertise and talent behind it."
India's digital infrastructure is expanding at an unprecedented pace. Yet, the server technology underpinning that infrastructure has historically been sourced from abroad, with Indian enterprises paying royalties and licensing fees to foreign entities.
Zoho Corp. is one of the few technology companies to have designed a homegrown server platform, with all intellectual property owned in India.
In 2020, Zoho set up a small team in Nagpur to work on R&D projects such as designing a server.
The Nathu La server motherboard and chassis platform is the result of more than five years of R&D across hardware, firmware and systems management.
Zoho plans to host its applications on the Nathu La server platform, enabling the company to optimise the full software-hardware stack for its specific workloads, reduce costs, improve performance and strengthen data governance for its global customers. This would also help bring down inference costs for Zoho's artificial intelligence (AI) usage.
"With AI advancements, inference costs are rising rapidly. With our strategy of using contextual, right-sized models, running on our own platform, on our own servers, in our own data centres, we are compounding the benefits accrued from owning and operating our entire technology stack. This ensures that our solutions are more sustainable and accessible for businesses. These long-term R&D investments we are making at every layer of the stack are aimed at delivering customer value," added Davey.
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