The Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) has taken a significant step towards the creation of a Grid Market Hub with the appointment of three consortia as Singapore's first National Grid Service Providers (GSPs). The three consortia are led by Singapore Computer Systems (SCS), PTC System, and NewMedia Express.

Targeted to be in place by 2013, the Grid Market Hub is an infocomm marketplace for sharing, buying and selling infocomm resources such as software, computing and storage. It will enable businesses, large and small, to make use of infocomm resources on-demand and on a pay-per-use basis.

Mr Khoong: Companies can expect a more robust and secure offering from the National Grid service providers.

According to Mr Khoong Hock Yun, IDA's Assistant Chief Executive (Infrastructure), the grid model capitalises on the wider trend of organisations moving their infocomm spending from capital expenditure to operating expenditure.

With the National Grid effort, businesses can buy compute capabilities for as low as S$0.33 per core hour, and data storage capacity for as low as S$0.48 per GB per month. This is opposed to having to spend thousands of dollars buying and maintaining in-house servers, or leasing them from overseas grid providers who typically charge about US$1 per CPU hour.

The National Grid also enables firms that require high performance computing, such as animation companies or financial organisations that do data-crunching, to scale up their computing power as and when they need to. They can look forward to local access to the compute capabilities of more than 2,500 cores for a start, scaling up to more than 3,500 cores by 2011, all on a pay-per-use basis.

In addition, more than 30TB of storage will be made available on the National Grid, making it possible for organisations to back up massive amounts of data.

By 2011, IDA is also targeting to have more than 80 Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers who will tap on the National Grid to offer services such as productivity and desktop publishing tools on a pay-per-use basis.

The three National Grid service providers are expected to offer commercial services by the end of 2008.

The SCS-led consortium will primarily offer two major categories of services – Platform as a Service (core on demand and storage on demand) and SaaS. The Platform as a Service focuses on driving enterprise adoption by leveraging grid resources for their infrastructure needs, said Mr Tan Tong Hai, President and Chief Executive Officer of SCS. SaaS will be targeting the SME markets to address their enterprise application needs.

The NewMedia Express consortium will offer the entire ecosystem of grid offerings ranging from raw CPU and storage on demand to SaaS services with both vertical and horizontal focus, said its Marketing Manager Ms Shirley Lee. The consortium's offerings include operating systems, Microsoft Office applications, remote access, application development, email, platform virtualisation, video streaming, web-based server management, web site creation and billing tools.

The third consortium, led by PTC System, will focus on Storage as a Service, targeting mainly users who require archival storage. "As the data on expensive primary storage grows, users can offload the data to a secondary storage at a remote site," said S.S. Lim, Managing Director of PTC System. "This will free up space on expensive primary storage and allow archive data to be kept on lower cost secondary storage."

Unlike the National Grid Pilot Platform, which was set up five years ago to provide universities and the research institutions with shared infocomm resources provisioned on a "best effort" basis, the National Grid service providers will offer paid services with Service Level Agreements. "Companies can therefore expect a more robust and secure offering," said Mr Khoong.

The government will lead the way in National Grid adoption, providing up to 40 per cent of the demand for the grid infrastructure, he said. Defence, the National Library Board and other government agencies are expected to come on board, as are organisations in sectors such as manufacturing, digital media and healthcare.