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Govt To Jumpstart National Grid Project

18 June 2008

The Business Times

By: Ong Boon Kiat

Public sector expected to buy 40% capacity of 3 service providers, says IDA official.

GOVERNMENT agencies are expected to buy 40 per cent of the capacity of three upcoming pay-per-use grid services, providing an early boost to the budding technology.

Mr Khoong: IDA will provide support through promoting the use of the National Grid

At a news conference yesterday, Khoong Hock Yun, assistant chief executive of the Infocomm Development Authority, said IDA expects agencies such as the Ministry of Defence, National Library Board and others to adopt the new National Grid, which will be ready by the year-end.

We also anticipate the manufacturing, digital media and even hospital sectors to be looking at testing it.' he said. 'Where it works for them, I think it makes a lot of sense to move from capex (capital expenditure) to opex (operational expenditure).

As part of its Intelligent Nation 2015 (iN2015) infocomm masterplan update, IDA yesterday unveiled three groups of vendors - led by Singapore Computer Systems (SCS), New Media Express and PTC System - as the National Grid service providers. The award follows IDA's Call-For-Collaboration (CFC) last November.

According to IDA, Singapore is one of the first to embark on such a national effort that draws together commercial grid service providers.

Mr Khoong said IDA will not be paying subsidies to the grid service providers but will instead support them by promoting the use of the National Grid among government agencies. 'What we are telling the industry is that you put the infrastructure in place and the government will look at how it can provide 40 per cent of the demand that service providers are setting up the infrastructure for,' he said.

IDA expects more than 3,000 small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) to use the National Grid by 2011.

Singapore already has a grid services infrastructure known as the National Grid Pilot Platform (NGPP). The upcoming National Grid will be 'much more commercial, robust and secure' compared to NGPP, Mr Khoong said.
Grid computing is commonly seen as the consolidation of dispersed computers in an organisation to form a virtual supercomputer. It is also equated to utility computing, where customers don't own computing hardware or software but pay a fixed rate for IT services as they use them.

The three winning consortiums showed their respective grid services offerings at IDA's CommunicAsia booth yesterday. Local IT service provider SCS, which has partnered computer giant Hewlett-Packard (HP), will offer a suite of pay-per-use applications, services, computing and storage. SCS chief executive Tan Tong Hai said having a grid computing platform will let SCS attract more independent software resellers (ISVs) to host their wares. 'We want to be an aggregator (of ISVs),' he said. The consortium has already signed up 28 ISVs. The SCS-HP service will see an initial deployment of 2,000 processor cores and 16 terabytes (TB) of storage.

Local Web-hosting firm New Media Express has partnered 1-Net Singapore, Microsoft Singapore and Fujitsu Asia. Up to 200 processors and five TB of storage will be on tap at first. The consortium intends to offer software-as-a-service (SaaS), through which applications such as Microsoft Office are delivered over the Internet to users' PCs.

Home-grown data management firm PTC System will offer pay-per-use storage, tapping on 20TB at first. Offering its grid service alone, the firm will initially target research agencies, while offering packages that help businesses manage data.