Empowering Singapore’s Public Sector to be AI-Ready

With demands on public services on the rise, a government ministry in Singapore worked with technology services partner NCS to modernize and future-proof its storage environment. The Pure Storage® platform enhances productivity, cost, and uptime while setting the foundation for an era of innovation with AI.

Citizens today have high expectations from government agencies. They expect agencies to operate efficiently, quickly, and continuously to improve the safety, health, and happiness of citizens’ lives. 

A government ministry in Singapore wanted to improve operations by delivering more modern, user-focused capabilities. Singapore has long been an innovator and early adopter of technology with one of the best IT infrastructures in the world, and the government is well-versed in designing cutting edge environments. Based on its goals, the ministry decided to upgrade its storage environment with a focus on high availability and performance for developers, balanced with low maintenance, cost, and environmental impact.

The ministry partnered with NCS, a leading technical services provider, to implement a future-proof data infrastructure that would drive sustainable innovation. NCS recommended migrating to an all-flash, power efficient storage environment from Pure Storage to address the ministry’s challenges.

The Pure Storage platform delivers both scale and performance needed to support a cloud strategy made for the AI era. The ministry uses a combination of Pure Storage FlashBlade® and Pure Storage FlashArrayTM to create a high performance, extremely efficient storage environment.

Virtual machines, production workloads and containerized environments run on FlashArray. The high efficiency and deduplication rates of FlashArray enable the ministry to achieve data reduction of up to 7:1. With this new agility and scalability, the IT team doesn’t need to worry about running out of room when developers want to start new projects or test open-source applications.

The performance and scale also give the ministry confidence to experiment with AI. They can now train AI models on production data, without altering or slowing down operations. 

The space, performance, and bandwidth create conducive environments for training AI models, opening the doors for increased AI research with less risk.

Pure Storage SafeModeTM also reduces time spent managing data backups. The immutable data snapshots cannot be erased, altered, or encrypted, and provide fast restorations at scale to keep data available at all times.

With space at a premium in Singapore, the ministry wanted to minimize floor space for the new environment. The Pure Storage platform requires a far smaller footprint, reducing four racks of legacy storage to less than a fourth of a rack – a 94% space saving. Not only does this save on floor space, but it lowers power consumption and cooling costs to help the ministry meet ESG regulations. Lower power and space for storage also means more is available for the specialized compute and GPUs necessary for new AI initiatives.

The Pure Storage platform is so easy to use and maintain that the typical seven-day training for new staff now takes just two hours. Portworx® further simplifies management, deployment, and control over AI applications in the containerized environments, handling critical storage tasks with ease. As a result, the ministry can hire fewer maintenance staff and focus more resources on high-value tasks such as in-house app development. Apps that once took five years to develop in-house can now be built in just four to six months.

With the Pure Storage platform in place, the ministry has confidence that its storage is ready to handle any IT demands in the future, including running AI applications on the edge for greater performance and security.