Singapore Government Selects Pure Storage and NCS

By Chua Hock Leng, VP, ASEAN and Greater China, Pure Storage, Inc.

Taking steps to align its IT infrastructure with its Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) goals even as it embraces AI, a Singapore ministry reduced its storage footprint by 94% with the Pure Storage platform.

With a bold ambition to hit net-zero emissions by 2045, 5 years ahead of the national 2050 target, the Singapore government is taking the lead in environmental stewardship. It is championing Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) initiatives and implementing strategies to reduce the sector’s carbon footprint, all while setting a global benchmark for environmental leadership, even as it embraces AI.

A Pure Storage survey revealed that 90% of Singapore’s public agencies are actively seeking ways to mitigate AI’s impact on energy consumption. Notably, 77% of these public agencies expressed concern over AI’s rising energy demands, adding that this could hinder their sustainability efforts.

Against this backdrop, a Singapore ministry has taken decisive steps to align its IT infrastructure with its Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) goals in the AI era. It engaged NCS Pte Ltd, a technology services firm in the AsiaPac region, to facilitate its migration to the Pure Storage all-flash, power-efficient data platform.

The investment aimed to address 4 areas: ensuring HA and performance for developers, minimizing maintenance to boost efficiency, optimising resources, and lowering environmental impact.

Aligning AI Initiatives with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Goals
The Singapore ministry chose Pure Storage FlashArray to power its VMs, production workloads, and containerized environments to ensure efficient operations. The all-flash storage scales non-disruptively, while delivering rapid data access and HA, to support the ministry’s growing digital needs.

The ministry also selected Pure Storage FlashBlade to streamline complex AI workflows for the ministry. FlashBlade is a unified scale-out file and object storage platform and features an innovative architecture that offers efficiency, simplicity, and exceptional performance.

“NCS has always been passionate about helping governments digitalise the core of public services and empowering citizens to live, work, and play better,” said Vicardo Ng, senior director and practice lead, for CloudOps, NCS. “The Pure Storage platform perfectly aligns with our vision to accelerate innovation in public services through data-driven models. It serves as a blueprint for secure, responsive infrastructure in the AI era.“

Advancing Environmentally Sustainable Operations with an Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG)-focused Technology Partner
One of the most immediate benefits of adopting the Pure Storage platform is its compact design, which reduces physical infrastructure requirements. With Pure Storage, the Singapore ministry successfully transitioned from 4 racks of legacy storage systems to less than one-fourth of a rack – a 94% reduction in its storage footprint.

The high efficiency and de-dupe capabilities of FlashArray enable the ministry to achieve data reduction ratios of up to 7:1. By eliminating redundant data and compressing storage, FlashArray allows more data to be stored in a smaller footprint without compromising performance. Reduced data volume leads to cost savings, improved system responsiveness, and a more sustainable storage model.

With this newfound agility and scalability, the Singapore ministry’s IT team no longer needs to worry about running out of storage capacity as developers launch new projects or experiment with open source applications. Flexible, scalable infrastructure from Pure Storage drives continuous innovation, enabling the Singapore ministry to proactively address evolving citizen data needs.

Lowering its environmental footprint also reinforces the ministry’s commitment to sustainability. By optimizing storage, it sets a benchmark for responsible energy use, aligning with Singapore’s goal to reduce emissions to between 45 and 50 MtCO2e in 2035.

With less space and power consumed by redundant storage, organisations can better allocate resources to areas like advanced computing and AI initiatives. The additional room can be used to install and run specialized compute resources and GPUs for processing complex AI tasks and driving innovation.

Upholding Sustainability – in Both Environmental and Economic Terms
The Singapore ministry has streamlined operations with the Pure Storage platform, which is designed for ease of use and maintenance. Staff training, which once took 7 days, now requires just 2 hours – improving onboarding efficiency.

With Portworx by Pure Storage, managing AI applications in containerized environments is simpler than ever, as it streamlines deployment, control, and critical storage tasks. Portworx is a Kubernetes data services platform designed to provide persistent storage, data protection, DR, and other capabilities for containerized applications. While Portworx was designed from the bottom up to run on any storage platform, the massively parallel and performing all-flash storage solutions from Pure Storage are the perfect hardware counterpart for Kubernetes-powered apps. Together, Pure Storage and Portworx provide a complete storage infrastructure solution.

To provide even more protection to its data infrastructure, the ministry activated SafeMode, which reduces the time spent managing backups. The immutable data snapshots cannot be erased, altered, or encrypted, and provide fast restorations at scale to keep data available at all times.

This efficiency allows the ministry to optimize resources-reducing the need for maintenance staff and allowing the organisation to focus on high-value initiatives like in-house app development. Applications that previously took the ministry 5 years to develop can now be built in just four to 6 months, accelerating innovation and fueling long-term growth.

Space, performance, and bandwidth are crucial considerations in creating optimal environments for training AI models and advancing AI research with reduced risk. Pure Storage strengthens public agencies’ capability to future-proof storage infrastructure to meet evolving IT demands, including deploying AI applications at the edge for enhanced performance and security.

Beyond reducing physical storage space, Pure Storage solutions also help minimise e-waste by offering modular, non-disruptive upgrades that extend their lifespan beyond a decade.

“NCS is committed to driving climate action by providing green digital services to organisations in critical sectors, such as the government. With Pure Storage’s energy-efficient infrastructure, we are able to empower public agencies to fast-track their sustainability goals by delivering high-performance solutions that help them meet their environmental targets,” said Ng.

Case study: Empowering Singapore’s Public Sector to be AI-ready