Zoho not looking at commercialising its 'Nathu La' servers yet

Sridhar Vembu's technology company Zoho marked its foray into the hardware segment with the launch of its India-designed server, 'Nathu La', named after the high-altitude mountain pass in the Himalayas. However, the company said the server has been developed primarily to meet its own infrastructure requirements and that it currently has no plans to commercialise the product.

Mangesh Sadafale, Head of Hardware Development, Zoho Corp., said, "We have developed Nathu La only for Zoho's internal usage now." In a bid to develop its own end to end tech stack, "As a start, we will have Nathu La servers at our data centres within India and we will roll out to other countries as we scale. We also intend to host our applications on our server, which will enable us to optimise our entire tech stack depending on the nature of the workload, thereby reducing cost and improving performance," Sadafale added.

According to the company, the server was designed and developed at its Nagpur centre under the SETU (Student's Engagement for Transformative Upskilling) initiative and represents the culmination of five years of research and development (R&D) across hardware, firmware, and systems management. Powered by Intel Xeon 6 processors, the servers are designed to optimise performance for virtualisation (VM), high-performance computing (HPC), AI inference and storage applications.

Given the global supply constraints in chips and processors, coupled with unprecedented demand from hyperscalers driven by the massive computing power requirements of artificial intelligence, Sadafale said, "We are working with Intel and other semiconductor partners to manage the supply chain. The main concern is the large-scale production supply of Solid-State Drive (SSD) and Double Data Rate (DDR). However, we are working closely with the respective suppliers to mitigate the risk.”

With over five patents filed in thermal management and cost-optimised server architecture designs, the company said that all the modular components, including the DC-SCM (Datacenter Secure Control Module) and NIC (Network Interface Card), were designed by Zoho's in-house hardware engineering team and assembled by Indian EMS partners.

These servers would be playing a role in optimising specific workloads thereby reducing cost, improving performance, and also bring down the inference cost for Zoho's AI usage. While the company did not specify how much this would reduce the cost, Sadafale added, “We have already noticed a reduction in the total cost ownership (TCO) by 20-30% and a 12-18% lower power consumption. All the investments that we are making at every layer of the tech stack are geared towards improving customer value.”