While the advancement of cloud platforms has helped companies and businesses to develop secure and stable applications and products for their customers, the computational model used by these cloud platforms, the virtualized nature of the infrastructure on which these cloud platforms operate, and/or the remoteness of cloud data centers from edge data sources make these platforms unsuitable for applications that need to process large amounts and speeds of data in real time.
According to Gartner, by 2025 more than 50% of the data managed by companies will be created and processed outside of data centers or the cloud. In addition, organizations are increasingly seeking real-time insights into combined current and historical data, but are being forced to compromise to massive increases in volume, velocity, and data diversity that are pushing the limits of their data technology.
This realm is broken by N5 Technologies, whose Rumi™ platform provides a complete infrastructure for building massively scalable, real-time applications that can run anywhere while providing complete fault tolerance and predictable performance. Rumi achieves this by providing a computing engine that brings together data, processing power and business logic into a single, hyper-converged software node. Girish Mutreja, Founder and CEO of N5 Technologies, says: “What we are bringing to market is a next-generation compute cloud platform purpose-built for applications that need to process and deliver massive amounts and speeds of data in real-time and run in a way that unifies the core clouds, edge environments, virtualized and bare metal systems.”
Solving real-time problems
Girish explains that real-time systems are data-intensive and need to process huge amounts of data very quickly. This is something current cloud computing platforms can’t do, he says, for one of three reasons: “One is that the compute infrastructure and model offered by the cloud just isn’t suited to these types of applications . Second, the virtualized nature of the cloud does not meet the performance and infrastructure requirements of a particular class of these applications. And third, the data is just too far removed from the core. So the systems just take too long to get the data into the core before they can act on it.”
N5 is currently focused on building applications for the financial markets and trading industry, a specialty of Girish, who has decades of experience working with financial markets, particularly Wall Street, having lived in the US for almost 30 years. Although he majored in math while studying at IIT Kanpur, Girish says his love of working with computers led him to switch to the field of computer science. After working with retail banking platforms at another startup in India for a few years, he moved to the US to develop end-user products and solutions for capital and financial markets.
Throughout his career, Girish has recognized the complexities of building data-intensive, high-performance computing applications. Most of these systems are built from scratch due to the lack of a fundamental platform on which to easily build such applications. Girish’s goal has always been to provide a platform that handles the infrastructural heavyweight for such applications, allowing developers to focus on the business logic and not the infrastructure code. Until recently, the technology landscape was insufficient to provide such an infrastructural substrate. However, Girish believes that the ultra-low-latency consensus algorithm he invented (which is at the core of N5’s hyper-converged node technology) combined with next-generation networking and storage technologies that have matured in recent years is just such a thing platform allows .
Winning Insights
“The financial markets have long demonstrated the need for these types of applications: applications that need to process very large amounts of data in real time, be they trade execution systems or systems that serve as an ecosystem for trade execution systems, data management systems and data processing systems that process market data and intelligent market data to feed into trade execution systems,” says Girish, adding that similar requirements can be seen across almost every vertical industry, from hyper-personalization in e-commerce based on current behavior, not past behavior, to automotive telematics systems, Recommend self-driving cars, pick-up-and-go shops, and cashless shops.
Founded in 2020, N5 Technologies is unique in that it has been fully bootstrapped and already has important partnerships in place. It has won three major clients including a major Fortune Global 500 investment bank, a major top 15 hedge fund and a Fortune 500 casino/resort. Girish says Rumi™ has already helped these clients achieve great benefits.
For example, an investment bank running all of its stock trading on Rumi™ has achieved savings of $50 million per year based on the elimination of penalties, a far more robust system, a 10x improvement in latency, a 20x improvement throughput and a reduction in footprint from around 200 servers to six servers.
Technical support
By building partnerships, N5 is able to stay ahead of the curve by leveraging various cutting-edge technologies and optimizing its solution for different hardware and infrastructure. Joining the Intel Startup Program in August 2022, Girish explains, has helped them gain access to Intel’s extensive technical resources and hardware and prepare for future sales and joint solution partnerships.
“Our relationship with Intel allows us to work closely together to ensure we can use technologies like persistent memory as efficiently as possible and possibly even leverage their CPUs and ensure the code is generated by our platform, or the Disclosed Monitoring and management frameworks can allow people to see how efficiently the underlying CPU and resources are being used by Intel and tune the application for maximum performance,” says Girish, adding that he has productive conversations with Intel Mentor Shridhar Bendi, Senior Principal Engineer, Intel India.
Since N5 leverages Intel’s RAS (Remote Access Service) efficient servers (7 Series) and power efficient servers (5 Series) for Rumi™, Shridhar says Girish’s deep technical understanding and business acumen helped N5 expand its partnership with the Intel Startup Program very good to use , and looks forward to further cooperation with them. “The number of financial institutions and asset classes is growing rapidly, while the market size and global spending on financial systems is many times larger. As N5’s Rumi™ seeks to address the challenges faced by the financial trading world, bespoke platforms developed by N5 will serve well provided Si/Platform demonstrates differentiating KPIs,” explains Shridhar.
“She [Intel] recognize the potential of what we do and the value they can bring by enabling us to enhance our platform on Intel resources. It’s only been a short run so far because we were only accepted into the Intel startup program a few months ago. Things are starting to turn and I’m really looking forward to further discussions with Shridhar and the other mentors,” says Girish.
Beyond the world of finance
After Girish has refined its product for the financial markets industry, N5 will soon target other industries that require real-time data processing. “We believe the world is moving towards real-time and being responsive versus proactive with continuous contextual interaction with one’s environment is the norm of the future. For example, if I walk into a retail store and I want that store to be a fully cashless take-out store, about six terabytes of data is sloshing around every second just to make sure the customers are recognized, their wallets are processed, the risk becomes managed, the quotes are created, the signage is updated in real time – it’s a lot of data and we need to process it intelligently and reliably. And that’s essentially what we enable. The intent is to provide a new computing platform that will enable such systems to be built with a significantly reduced time to market and cost, without compromising the requirements for high performance and reliability,” concludes Girish.
The Intel Startup Program: Enables startups to scale their breakthrough innovations
The Intel Startup Program is Intel India’s flagship program to partner with technology startups that have intellectual property or innovative solutions that have the potential to impact customers and align with Intel’s focus areas. The program is at the forefront of collaborating with India’s start-up ecosystem through high-impact collaborations with industry, academia and government, and runs multiple initiatives that are either vertical or focused on emerging technologies.
It partners with startups that have a unique global or local value proposition to solve real customer problems, backed with industry domain and business expertise and mentoring from Intel.
