The Hindu : Front Page : Crafting Net’s smart sentinels

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Sunday, Sep 02, 2007
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Front Page

Crafting Net’s smart sentinels

Special Correspondent

Pune engineers have designed the network controllers

— Photo: Special Arrangement

NetXen engineers in the server room of the Pune centre.

Bangalore: A team of 30 engineers at the Pune development centre of NetXen has created chips that build intelligence into many of the most popular servers used to control computer networks. Your ‘gateway’ machine could have come from any of the major international makers: Hewlett Packard or Dell or IBM. Chances are that ticking away beneath the hood is a network controller, ‘made in India,’ that helps the system adjust ‘on the fly’ to sudden changes in traffic density, unforeseen glitches, sudden explosion in demand.

A company driven by Indian enterprise, NetXen has a unit in Santa Clara, in the heart of the U.S. Silicon Valley, where some 50 per cent of the ‘firmware’ — often used combinations of hardware and software — has been developed.

Founder-Chief Executive Govind Kizhepat explained during a special briefing for The Hindu, that data centres today needed to be ‘agile,’ responding to sharp changes in demand. NetXen had created a niche networking produc t that was highly scalable — that means the same basic building blocks could be mixed and matched so that a very wide range of systems from one-PC servers to large grid computers with units spread across the world could be fuelled.

The demand for this product of desi brains was so good that the company had decided to pump in some $5million into its Indian end over the next two years, to increase its design team here to about 100 engineers.

“There is an explosion of information that is flowing across the world’s networks,” Mr. Kizhepat says, “storage of all this data has become ‘virtual’ – you no longer need to know where it is stored. We are helping to do the same thing for the network.”

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