Storage On Demand (SOD)

John Kan, CIO, Agency For Science, Technology and Research

SOD is a new way of consuming Storage via a utility model instead of outright purchase. Previously, organisations would consolidate input on the storage needs of  their working community, before calling tenders to acquire the required storage as well as additional buffers to cater for adhoc requests. This model of procuring storage meant that organisations often used only 50% of what was procured throughout the lifespan of the equipment. This is both time consuming and wasteful as organisations would have to pay for buffer storage that might not be usedin order to cater for adhoc needs.

With the SOD platform, we have a committed baseline storage plus a flexible buffer that we can tap on. This allows us to provide our users with almost immediate storage provisioning while ensuring that we only pay for what we use.  For traditional storage systems, users need to invest more instorage infrastructure that pose challenges in the form of the need for maintenance and data refresh every three to fouryears. Under the traditional procurement model, storage solutions have to be upgraded periodically, requiring companies to purchase new hardware and migrate data to new systems constantly. The migration process entails a high degree of complexity and costs. As SOD is based on a utility model, the need for inventory, maintenance, migration, technologyh refresh, etc will no longer be a concern. As SOD is based on a utility model, users can immediately leverage on it for their storage needs. This helps to reduce the procurement lead-time from 2 – 3 months down to just a few days.SOD effectivelyeliminates these hassles while being effective in addressing users’ needs.

Operationally, in the event of hitting the high watermark on the flexible buffer storage, it will then be converted to the baseline storage and a