Zenith announces the global launch of India's first cloud-PROUD

[jayanthi mandhalapu]

Zenith InfoTech Ltd., an IT product development company with 27,000 customers worldwide has announced the global launch of its latest, first of its kind computing platform – PROUD, a single infrastructure for running all business computing needs. PROUD, which is a private cloud computing system, is a completely new paradigm on how IT infrastructure will be purchased, used and managed.

PROUD has been engineered by over 250 computer scientists, across Belgium, Germany, Mumbai and Bangalore, working for more than 4 years, at a total cost of Rs. 175 crores. PROUD is the most ambitious product development initiative ever undertaken by an Indian IT company.

PROUD is a single centralized computing system which replaces the need for customers to buy computing and network hardware as separate and difficult to manage components. Customers can run their entire IT infrastructure within as virtual machines within the cloud environment – be it desktops (which now run as virtual desktops), servers as well as appliances such as firewalls, routers and VoIP systems. Advanced functionality such as high-availability, instant failover, continuous backups, predictive failure monitoring and granular capacity management, which traditionally have been expensive and separately paid for items, are an integral part of the PROUD platform. PROUD's unique scale-out approach to computing, allows customers to add capacity when they need it without undergoing expensive rip and replace cycles.

PROUD fulfils the idea of utility/cloud computing, where IT is an operational cost instead of a capital expense and yet is privately owned by the customer. PROUD allows businesses to run their existing software and applications without any modification and yet reap the benefits of cloud computing. Traditionally cloud computing needed customers to outsource their IT to a third party datacenter, however with PROUD customers' host, control and manage their cloud themselves. PROUD also allows businesses the flexibility of using both commercial and open source software through a unique concept called virtual appliances.

With PROUD, Zenith is providing CIOs and IT managers with an industrial strength computing infrastructure that is highly reliable, redundant, easy to manage and yet is cost effective.