CIOTechOutlook >> Magazine >> January - 2014 issue

Netweb Technologies: Redefining HPC and Unified Storage in India

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The deployment of High Performance Computing in India has been on a sturdy expansion curve. The scenario opens up situations where an optimal sum of Knowledge capital and Intellectual property can be generated. In India, the adoption of HPC is boosted by government spending, primarily by the department of Science and Technology, towards budgeting for development of computing capabilities for the whole range of high performance applications by various labs. Adding to this is the Indian government’s thrust on increasing overall High Performance Computing capability in India with an investment to the tune of 3 billion dollars made to fund its growth in the country. NetWeb India, widely known for its implementation of the ParamYuva II, India’s fastest Hybrid supercomputer till date, plans to ride this change with its decade old experience at deploying HPC solutions. Under the leadership of Sanjay Lodha, CEO, Netweb, the company utilizes the latest cutting edge technologies to offer non-proprietary, highly inter operable components, while managing existing manpower and maintenances with minimal running cost and hence, increasing ROI for the customer.


Netweb has made a name for itself today for its out of the box, totally customizable solutions. The case in point can be made through how Netweb helped deploy an HPC solution for one of India's premier research institutes. The institute, funded by the department of Science and Technology, and headed by the government of India, required a High Performance Computing (HPC) solution along with a Parallel File System (PFS) which would facilitate comprehensive redundancy. However, the challenge at hand was to find an HPC provider who could alter the PFS based on a Lusture File System, from zero redundancy to complete redundancy (Lustre Based systems were known for their incapability at providing redundancy features). Netweb Technologies took up the responsibility of overcoming this challenge.


The Netweb team, was able to initiate a solution by incorporating DRBD(Distributed Replicated Block Device) and High Availability which permitted the 48 node cluster to simultaneously access the storage (PFS) with 1.5 GB/s throughput. Netweb, having deployed HPC services for over a decade, once again gained from its experience in the field and built "twin servers" that would act as Meta Data servers for the institute. The "twin server" approach, where all systems were on dual configuration inside a single enclosure, proved to be the game changer.


Metamorphosing to Sustain and Deliver

Overcoming such tricky challenges is just a routine day's job for the engineers at Netweb. The company actually traces its roots back to 1991, coincidentally the year when India's first Supercomputer, the Param 8000, made its debut. The company began its operations in networking. "We are one of the first organizations in India to introduce a product from international companies where we were servicing with the mirrors and servicing link cards as a SFT3 based solution," says Lodha.


The company laid its foundation by servicing major banks, newspaper companies and hospitals that had to modernize computerization. Later, Netweb delved into the commodities market; trying to bring in the popularity of network cards as the high visibility markets were hooking in to novel SFT3 based solutions and the OSS(Operational Support Systems) began to dictate industry growth.


As the commodity market began to liquidate, the company planned to reposition itself into servers and workstations. Netweb began to customize servers and grew its relationship with clients and vendors, while at the same time, growing in expertise and experience. "Today on our website we do have 210 models lined up and we can still customize many more as per our customer needs and requirements," says a proud Lodha. The company has come this far solely due to the emphasis given on customizing a solution to the exact requirement of the customer, and going the extra mile for the same.


Paving the Way through Strategic Partnerships

All along the way, through strategic alliances and partnerships, Netweb has carved a name for itself for its unique approach to its three main areas, mainly Unified & Storage Arrays, High Performance Computing and Data Centre Computing. "We have forged alliances with industry leaders in the storage, server, and HPC ecosystem to provide best-in-class products to provide solutions that combine speed, reliability, and scalability with energy efficiency to deliver maximum ROI at lower TCO," explains Lodha. The company is in close partnerships with some of the big players in the market, namely Intel, SuperMicro, Mellanox, AMD, Altair and Dolphin to name a few.


Successes through Strategic Partnerships

Leveraging the strategic partnerships with the big players of the industry, Netweb today provides custom configured solutions for the HPC (supercomputing) environments and related applications for verticals that span across Pharma, Manufacturing, Oil and Gas, Animation R&D, Earth sciences, Defense sectors, Science and Technology verticals in India and other developing economies around the world. As more and more organizations utilize computer enabled simulations to not only help solve complex scientific, business and other technical problems but also to reduce time to market their cutting edge product or service innovations, Netweb tries to tap into this revolution by constantly keeping abreast of latest innovations. The product engineering team within the company recently introduced HPC on the cloud and is also extensively researching on Big Data solutions. Having a strong presence in the industry with customer satisfaction as the backbone, The Company has come of its own today since starting out in 1991. The testimony of their prowess in HPC can be pointed out at having over 5000 customers in the portfolio and over 200 deployments in HPC alone.


The focus on HPC has definitely made a few heads turn in the industry. "We are now getting RFP calls from bigger customers who initially preferred the branded proprietary solutions across target markets both within and outside India. We provide a wide array of storage and server solutions and have built dedicated teams who work strategically for deployment in the customer areas," says a gleaming Lodha.




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