Tyrone Systems, an Indian company, providing servers, storage, back-up, and HPC solutions globally, aims to change the way the world works, by offering right technology and customized solutions. To understand their current and future strategy better, we recently interviewed Sandeep Lodha, VP, Sales & Marketing, where he has unfolded Tyrone’s vision and mission.
1) How has been the journey of Tyrone systems so far in India?
The journey has been quite remarkable for us, Today we produce about 5000 servers annually in our factory in Parwanoo, Himachal Pradesh and have more than 400 different HPC installations in India and abroad. The current fastest Hybrid HPC implementation in India is done by us. We offer “HPC on cloud” wherein customers can access powerful and expensive supercomputing platforms on usage based pricing. We have strong presence in Unified and Flexible storage solutions market. We have strong customer footprint in emerging segments like Media and entertainment and gaining better foothold in across other technology driven segments like telecom. We also provide parallel file system solutions and have a good installation base for these solutions. We have done few large Big Data implementations recently and now heavily investing on a Big data team which can do end to end solutions for our customers.
2) What unique technologies / solutions Tyrone systems so far has introduced for Indian market?
Tyrone offers a number of unique offerings to the Indian market:
Our HPC and Big Data solutions give us ample opportunities to think out of the box and offer high performance, energy efficient and cost-effective solutions to customers in India and around the world.
In our server product range we list more than 250 server models on our website, perhaps the largest such listing from any vendor in India that customers can choose from using an extremely easy product selector. And we continuously add new models based on evolving customer and application needs. In spite of all this should any customer still need another configuration we do customize it for them.
Our flagship storage product, sold as FS2 OPSLAG, is a range of unified storage solutions that can be scaled with ease as per evolving customer need over time. FS2 supports NAS, Block level and VTL in one single box eliminating the need for three disparate boxes and with flexibility to use and allocate the spaces as per customer requirement. It supports virtually every interconnect including Gigabit, 10G, 40G, FC and InfiniBand. Customers can choose to utilize interconnect or in any combination or all of them. This flexibility helps them to not stick to one infrastructure and the system can be used even if there are uncertainties in the future path that they may want to take. We were one of the few companies in the world to first have Native InfiniBand support. FS2 also scales from few TB to more than 2PB. We do have select models where we support SSD acceleration typically for customers looking for higher IOPS but at lower cost.
Our “HPC on cloud” offering is designed to bring HPC to mainstream enterprise and within reach of SME, student, other nongovernmental organizations, on a pay per use basis. This is likely to influence lot more organizations to use HPC in their product design, usage testing and analytics.
3) While already there several solutions are available in India to address Datacenter and storage market, what unique does Tyrone offer to industry?
I guess I have mentioned some part of that information in my earlier point. We are continuously innovating in storage space. We are launching a disk based cold storage solution typically for the archival related requirements. One can store real high volume of data at a very low cost. We are also planning a storage solution directed towards cloud, where ISP would be able to guarantee certain performances to the customer and customer can also independently take control of the portion of the storage they have bought.
4) Does Tyrone offer any significant solution in DR space? If so, how is it differentiated from others?
We are not deep in DR as such but we do have capability to build such solutions for our customers. We do have Tyrone Deux solution for High availability and Fault tolerance market. This solution helps customer to shift their server virtual machines to Deux where we have a virtual layer running over two servers and it does give fault tolerance as well as provide some load sharing.
5) What initiative has been taken by Tyrone to offer cloud advantage to their customers?
We have been involved with cloud technology for our customers especially in Private and Hybrid cloud infrastructure setup. We also have “HPC on Cloud” offering to customers keen on accessing HPC platforms on pay per use basis. Our HPC on cloud solution is a niche offering and very unlike others who offer these solutions just out of their normal cloud infrastructure. Our HPC on Cloud solutions offers amongst other advantages like high-end interconnect, state of art hybrid systems, a dedicated team of qualified professionals available on standby to configure/assist customers and a vast repertoire of applications for customers to choose from. Given that we have a huge installation base in HPC, we understand a customer’s need more accurately and are in a better position to help them configure and use HPC applications via cloud.
6) Do you have any specific solution in Data protection space to protect customer’s data?
Our Tyrone FS2 OPSLAG product line comes with integrated VTL. Customers can use this truly unified storage solution for file and block level data access and configure VTL for near line data protection. We also offer Tyrone Deux as a HA and Fault tolerance solution. And we are shortly planning to launch a backup appliance.
7) Have you partnered with Indian government in the high performance computing space? If so, to what extent?
Good thing is that new Indian Govt. policies are now getting boost with supercomputing in focus. This is heartening news. We firmly believe that HPC is going to fuel the nation’s future and put the country in a leadership position amongst knowledge based economies around the world. HPC is already getting mainstream and although we don’t normally know it is the used in the development of various products and services that we use in our everyday life. We do not have any one partnership with govt. on this regard but bulk of our HPC installations are being used by Govt. and it’s related agencies in Education and R & D sector. We work closely with most of them on a one to one basis as of now.
8) What is your future strategy?
Like HPC, we see a big traction in Big Data. Naturally we are investing heavily there. We are working on various partnerships too. We are also increasing our presence in other regions both within and outside the country. Having setup a strong presence in ASEAN, we will increase our focus in Middle East by second quarter of next year.