January 201719 SOD is a new way of consuming storage via a utility model instead of outright purchase. Previously, organizations 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 organizations often used only 50 percent of what was procured throughout the lifespan of the equipment. This is both time consuming and wasteful as organizations would have to pay for buffer storage that might not be used in 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 in-storage infrastructure that pose challenges in the form of the need for maintenance and data refresh every three to four years. 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, technology 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 effectively eliminates 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 new buffer storage will be shipped in. This continuity allows the users to have `unlimited rapid scalability' on the SOD platform. In addition, there is also an offsite SOD option to allow the users to `overflow' their data to offsite SOD which helps to reduce the floor space requirement in Data Centres. There is also provision for users with different performance requirements within the SOD platform. With SOD, we now only have to pay for what we use and it will scale with our needs. As users have absolute transparency on their storage consumption, they are now more conscious of their storage utilisation, changing their storage usage behaviour i.e. doing more `housekeeping' which in turn reduces the storage used. It also enables users involved in collaborative projects Storage On Demand (SOD)By John Kan, CIO, Agency for Science, Technology and ResearchCIO INSIGHTS
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