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PRESS RELEASES

Singapore's commercial grid goes live

3 December 2008

IDA News

Section: News

By: IDA News Editorial Staff

Businesses in Singapore can now tap on compute, storage and software facilities on a pay-per-use basis, with the launch of services on the National Grid on 1 November 2008.

In June this year, the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) appointed three consortia as Singapore's first National Grid Service Providers. The consortia are led by Singapore Computer Systems (SCS www.scs.com.sg), PTC System (www.ptc.net) and NewMedia Express(www.newmediaexpress.com).

In the rollout of its commercial grid offerings, SCS has partnered Hewlett-Packard and 20 global and local grid computing players to launch Alatum (www.alatum.com.sg).

Alatum, which is Latin for "winged", comprises an initial base of 2,400 CPUs and 16 TB of storage and delivers computing power, storage and software applications on a pay-per-use, on-demand and online basis. The services are targeted at public sector agencies as well as commercial organisations looking for cost-effective, integrated and easily-managed IT solutions.

The partners include software players Haley, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.com, Actuate, Aksaas, AlpSoft, Avartis, BLC Solutions, Clik Technologies, iZeno, Melioris, Philip Tang & Sons, and Netsuite, and strategic technology partners Citrix Systems, IBM WebSphere Commerce and its partner Cnetric, Platform Computing, Red Hat and SingTel. According to SCS' Executive Vice President Mr Alvin Kok, monthly subscription for the services will range from S$18 to S$1,500 per user.

One of the enterprise customers to have signed up with Alatum so far is K2 Specialist Services, which provides inspection, maintenance and repair services to the oil and gas industry. According to its Managing Director Mr Nick Conway, project budgeting, forecasting and cash flow management are critical to its ongoing business success. By making use of Avartis Planning OnDemand edition on Alatum, the company is able to access advanced financial planning features with minimal implementation time and low capital investment. The solution is also able to scale up according to company's needs, he said.

Another consortium, led by PTC System, has announced the launch of Storage-as-a-Service for enterprise and government agencies. The service allows customers to host archival data on a remote site without the need to install and maintain a separate site for archive data, thus reducing deployment cost.

The current infrastructure has 30 TB of storage space, which can be easily scaled up to handle 100 TB. It offers an SLA of 99.9 per cent, with options to support tape backup and data encryption. The encryption solution provides customers a fully protected environment when they host the archive data. The main users are enterprises from the pharmaceutical sector and research institutions. PTC System is working with independent software vendors to offer bioinformatics applications as services. These will allow users to run virtual clinical trials without having to invest in hardware and databases.

"Archiving data out of expensive primary storage will help enterprises solve a growing pain and reduce the overall cost," said Mr SS Lim, Managing Director of PTC System. "Through our grid offerings, we can show enterprises the benefits of using storage as a service." The consortium is pricing its storage service from S$1 (US$0.66) per gigabyte per month.

The consortium led by NewMedia Express, which was also appointed by IDA in June, will offer applications such as Microsoft Office, enterprise resource planning, remote managed backup, e-mail, platform virtualisation, web-based server management, web site creation and billing tools. Called nGrid (ngrid.sg/main/home/), other members of the consortium include 1-Net, Advance ERP, Fujitsu Asia and Microsoft. Services, which are priced from S$10 per user per month, run on an infrastructure comprising 200 CPU cores and 10 TB of storage.