Zoho Corporation has announced the launch of Nathu La, an in-house designed server that represents a new step in its strategy to build and operate its own complete technological infrastructure, from the hardware layer to software applications.
In a context of increasing costs associated with AI infrastructure, the new Zoho Nathu La server reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) by 20% to 30% and reduces energy consumption by 12% to 18%, helping to maintain access to advanced technology without increasing costs or compromising performance.
This improvement helps reduce your environmental footprint and reduce AI inference costs that could otherwise be passed on to customers. The server incorporates Intel Xeon 6 processors and has been developed in collaboration with Intel, which has provided its technical expertise and specialized support capabilities.
«Over the last three decades, Zoho has been committed to developing its own technological infrastructure from scratch and Nathu La represents a new step within that strategy. Our vision is to combine AI models adapted to the context and sized according to each need with our own technological platform that now also incorporates internally designed servers and acceleration capabilities for AI workloads. By developing and operating every layer of our technology infrastructure, from hardware to applications, we can jointly optimize costs, performance and efficiency. These long-term investments in R&D respond to a very clear objective: to offer more value to our customers and build more sustainable, accessible and efficient solutions,” says Shailesh Davey, CEO of Zoho Corporation.
Building a complete technological infrastructure
Nathu La’s design philosophy is inspired by the principles of the Open Compute Project (OCP), with a focus on modularity, thermal efficiency and ease of maintenance. This approach enables Zoho data centers to significantly reduce both total cost of ownership and energy consumption.
The Zoho company plans to progressively host its applications on the Nathu La server platform, which will allow it to jointly optimize its hardware and software infrastructure to better respond to the specific needs of its workloads. This approach will help reduce costs, improve performance, strengthen data governance for its global customers, and reduce inference costs associated with Zoho’s use of AI.
As processing costs in AI-linked data centers increase, customers are increasingly faced with the impact of those increases. With Nathu La, Zoho seeks to continue offering advanced technology at a reasonable cost. That same commitment to value will also guide the way the company operates its data centers, optimizing both energy consumption and computing resources.
Zoho Nathu La Server Architecture
The Nathu La motherboard and chassis are the result of five years of research and development in hardware, firmware and systems management.
Based on Intel Xeon 6 processors, the server has been designed to optimize performance for virtualization (VM), high performance computing (HPC), AI inference, and storage loads. This results in better functioning of Zoho applications for end users.
Zoho plans to progressively host its applications on the Nathu La server platform
The server features custom power subsystems, a proprietary Data Center Secure Control Module (DC-SCM) design, and modular chassis options to support a variety of environments, providing flexibility for different types of deployments.
All modular components, including the DC-SCM and Network Interface Card (NIC), have been designed in-house by Zoho’s hardware engineering team and assembled by Indian Electronic Manufacturing Services (EMS) partners, enabling further value chain integration.
The company has also filed more than five patent applications related to advanced thermal management technologies and server architecture designs optimized to reduce costs.
