Ashutosh Vaidya, VP, Wipro Personal Computing Division, speaks to Biztech2 about how Wipro’s latest launch - the Supernova, a range of Supercomputers and Superstorage, will help enterprises support their applications more effectively in future. According to him, we will soon witness the new wave of outsourcing, which will see India emerge as the world R&D centre.

How do supercomputers promise to enhance efficiency in enterprises?

Supercomputing usage for enterprise applications is a promising market. Enterprise applications have traditionally been using large monolith servers with many CPUs on them. These applications are transitioning towards suitability to clustered architecture as in the Wipro Supernova. Over the next few years as more applications become available, enterprises too will be able to make the best use of supercomputers such as Wipro Supernova because of the price-performance benefit.

While supercomputers will take some time to see adoptability in enterprise applications, Wipro Supernova range of superstorage has significant benefits for large enterprises such as non-stop storage, linear scaling of performance as the capacity grows, modular approach to infrastructure requirements and better price-performance over conventional storage solutions.

How can massive distributed clustered storage technology and solutions help enterprises?

The storage essentially comprises of parallel file storage, which is built in similar lines as our supercomputers. These storage devices pack in a lot of IO throughput and availability, which is essential when we go to higher storage capacities. The technology we use enables the storage to be scaled up from a few TB as in the entry-level product to hundreds of petabytes. As we scale more, the performance also scales near linearly. The storage also has intelligent features such as self-healing, adaptive load balancing, etc which makes it more reliable and non-stop.

What is Wipro's expectation from the Indian market for its range of supercomputers?

The market is substantial; there is huge vacuum due to a clear price/ affordability gap. Supernova is a product that meets the market need with single point ownership, comes with an affordable price tag and a scalable range. The price point of the entry level product is 25 lacs and as we go higher it can be customised based on the customer’s application requirements. We are targeting not just the high end research establishments and corporate, but even the engineering colleges, digital media and broadcast, animation houses across the country.

What is the role of Z RESEARCH in this venture?

Z RESEARCH has developed the supercomputing software stack. Z RESEARCH has been building supercomputers for quite some time now. The technology Z RESEARCH brings makes the product significantly affordable and far better than the currently available products globally. Their supercomputing software is tried and tested across various deployments across the globe.

You've mentioned that India would emerge as the world R&D centre. Kindly elaborate.

We strongly believe that the next wave of outsourcing is going to hit us soon and this time around is going to be even bigger. India has now a proven track record of outsourcing. We have gained confidence from around the world and now can aim for a larger share of the pie with a significant move up the outsourcing value chain. We have the skills; we are the leaders when it comes to offshoring and we have the delivery models in place.