Overview

Scientists and computer engineers have coined the new term "Big Data" for the phenomenon; the amount of digital information increases tenfold every five years. Moore's law, which the computer industry now takes for granted, says that the processing power and storage capacity of computer chips double or their prices halve roughly every 18 months.

The world now contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information. By 2013 the amount of traffic flowing over the internet annually will reach 667 exabytes (an exabyte is 1,000 petabytes) according to Cisco. And the quantity of data continues to grow faster than the ability of the network to carry it all. The total amount of information of existence in 2010 is forecasted to be 1.2ZB (a zettabyte is 1,000 exabytes).

Managed well, Big Data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value. Technologies called "business intelligence" were available only to the world's biggest companies. But as the price of computing and storage has fallen and the software systems have got better and cheaper, the technology has moved into the mainstream. Historically, data was kept in different systems that were unable to talk to each other, such as finance, HR or customer management. Now the systems are being linked and companies are using data-mining techniques to get a complete picture of their operations.

Despite the abundance of tools to capture, process and share all this information - computers, mobile phones and the like - Big Data already exceeds the available storage space.

Research firm Gartner says that over five years, storage has been the fastest growing component of cost in data centres; their researchers say that within three years, users will install 6.5 times as many terabytes as they did this year.

According to a 2008 study by the McKinsey-Uptime Institute, the average data centre consumes energy equivalent to 25,000 households. And energy use is growing exponentially due to the growth of cloud-based services and online video. In the US alone, it is estimated that up to US$5 billion can be saved in power costs annually if the data centres were to go green, said the US Environmental Protection Agency in its "Report to Congress on Data Center and Server Energy Efficiency" in 2007.

With data centre energy costs skyrocketing, the industry is under increasing pressure to comply. In Singapore, a Green Data Centre Standards Working Group has been formed, with results due published by end 2010. With industry-accepted standards and metrics in place, energy efficiency can be rigorously compared between data centres - and, for Singapore, a case could be made for becoming a "living lab". In the words of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), this would "demonstrate the technical and financial feasibility of next generation green-enabling ICT technologies which promise to boost efficiency, cut costs and lower emissions."

Cloud computing - in which the internet is used as a platform to collect, store and process data - allows businesses to lease computing power as and when they need it, rather than having to buy expensive equipment. It's also changing the way businesses and consumers access the power of computing in profound and important ways.

As the data-centre industry becomes increasingly concerned with energy efficiency, cloud computing presents a compelling opportunity to reduce power bills. The adoption of private, public or hybrid cloud environments lets companies process the same workload with a lot less power than they could in their in-house data centres by spreading computing loads across many users and time zones. Organisations can also accelerate time to market, and support both existing and emerging, data-intensive workloads.

Companies who make use of the cloud can also rest in the knowledge that cloud operators, like Google, have focused on designing systems that use as little energy as possible. Google-designed data centres, their engineers claim, use about half the energy of a typical data centre.

Two Google facilities currently run on 100% recycled water, and the firm expects recycled water to soon provide 80% of their total data centre water consumption. All the electricity that goes into a data centre building ultimately turns into heat, and thus there are fans, pumps, and air conditioning equipment aplenty to remove all that heat.

In many data centres, cooling alone is responsible for a 30-70% overhead in energy usage. To combat this, their data centres make extensive use of the evaporative process and have installed cooling towers. This avoids the need for electricity-heavy chillers, which are used to refrigerate water, and are widely used in data centre cooling systems.

As soon as governments adopt carbon regulations, outsourcing storage to the cloud will suddenly become far more important to businesses. But in the meantime, the cloud is of huge significance to employee productivity. Online productivity suites like Google Apps are helping companies work in ways that aren't possible with traditional desktop applications. A spokesperson at Google Singapore gives a few examples:

"By reducing the traditional costs and labour associated with deploying, maintaining and upgrading business technology, IT departments are increasingly becoming free to devote their limited resources to projects more strategic to the business. Employees no longer have to access applications through complex systems that provide access to office-based servers."

Welcome to the brave new world of distributed enterprises, where employees are no longer bound to a particular device, where collaboration is seamlessly facilitated. Instead of sending countless copies of a document to a large group, you can give each person access to the document in the cloud, which they can all work on at once.

However, cloud computing necessitates ever greater bandwidth needs. Singapore's "Next Generation National Broadband Network" is leading a regional charge to provide wholesale fibre-to-home services. The country's 1Gbps (gigabits per second) fibre network is set for completion in 2012, wiring up some 1.1 million households, with access speeds of up to 1Gbps. More importantly for businesses, the network is expected to lower domestic connectivity charges for data centres.

Facts on the ground

According to a 2009 report by BroadGroup, a consultancy, South-East Asia is witnessing significant data centre growth and is expected to continue in expansion mode through 2013. The report states that supply of data centre space has lagged demand growth in the region, leading to a rush in data centre developments.

"Singapore leads the region in data centre capacity and number of players", the report continues, calling the country a "natural node" for data centres and noting its well-developed power and communications infrastructure, and strong demand for outsourcing from both private and public sectors. Commercial data centre space in Singapore is forecast by BroadGroup to grow approximately 71% over the next five years. Current capacity is in excess of 171,000 square metres.

Singapore's pro-business policies and highly developed infrastructure are also highlighted in the report; policies which have attracted some rather well-known technology players. IBM opened in May 2010 a cloud-computing laboratory in Singapore to help businesses, government and research institutions to design, adopt and reap the benefits of cloud technologies. The new lab is part of IBM's expansion of its global cloud computing capabilities.

A cross section of Singapore's industries will benefit from cloud computing, with key sectors such as banking, education, healthcare, government and telecommunications likely to be early adopters.

Savvis adopts virtualisation technologies to deliver power-consumption-lite cloud-computing services, which lets an enterprise build and deploy an entire virtual data centre on their cloud infrastructure in one fell swoop. Savvis operates nearly 30 data centres around the word, with total capacity of approximately 120,000 square metres. The company's newly expanded Singapore data centre hosts over 60 employees; the firm sees Singapore as the "gateway to South-East Asia".

Teresa Lim, managing director, IBM Singapore says of cloud computing that it's "...being acknowledged as a new computing model which can drive business transformation in a cost-effective manner." She further emphasised, "Due to the strong presence of many global enterprises in Singapore and the nation's ranking as the second most networked country in the world according to the Global Information Technology Report, we see the republic in a strong position to become the global Asia hub for cloud computing."

HP Labs Singapore, an advanced research facility and the company's 3rd largest corporate lab worldwide, opened in early 2010 to generate cutting-edge development on a range of projects that seek to re-examine data centre and application design principles. The Singapore lab will collaborate with HP counterparts in the UK and US.

As Christopher Whitney, HP Lab's Director of Service Automation and Integration puts it, "HP Labs Singapore will fundamentally re-examine how tomorrow's cloud computing needs will be met, and the advancements driven out from here will be paramount to businesses and the way they operate. The easy access to global talent, opportunities for research collaboration and an excellent network infrastructure, makes Singapore an ideal central hub for open innovation in the Asia Pacific region."

This follows a much-publicised partnership, the Open Cirrus test-bed, between HP, Yahoo, Intel, and Singapore's IDA, to establish an open cloud computing research test-bed. The goal: to promote open collaboration among industry, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, internet-scale computing.

The testing environment was designed to encourage research on the software, data centre management and hardware issues associated with cloud computing on a global scale.

The Singapore difference

"Once every decade or so, advances in technology emerge - and merge - to create a wave of change and opportunity. It's clear to me that Singapore intends to be in the forefront of this next great wave of technology-driven progress. From the government's strong focus on advanced infrastructure to the rapid adoption of cloud services in businesses and schools, Singapore is leading the way." Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer had this to say, and his arch competitors agree.

When asked what advantages they found in basing their regional operations in Singapore, a Google spokesman said that they are here because of the well educated, multilingual workforce, the strong economy with well-developed infrastructure, and the country's focus on creating a competitive, pro-business environment for international companies.

"As we expand our business and presence in Asia Pacific, it is important for us to have a centralised regional hub from which we can operate more efficiently across the region. Singapore is an ideal location because it is geographically centred in the region from Japan to India to Australia. So we will continue to invest in our operations in Singapore and grow our commitment here."

An early mover in IT, Singapore has risen to be the second most network-ready country in the world, according to the World Economic Forum's "Global Information Technology Report 2009/10", beating the strong contenders Denmark, Switzerland and the US.

More than 80 of the world's IT software and services companies are in Singapore. The huge presence of leading hardware, software, IT services and internet companies in Singapore creates significant synergies for the industry, and provides fertile ground for collaboration.

World-class internet and media companies will be able to host their content and services here in Singapore in the near future, as the Singapore government is planning to set up what could probably be the world's first dedicated Data Centre Park (DCP).

Occupying an area of up to 12 hectares, the DCP can support large enterprises like banks, retail chains, governments and insurance firms to store, sort and transact their data via secure facilities, reliable power supply and high-speed fibre-optic cable connections. According to the IDA, the proposed DCP may consist of six buildings offering up to 120,000 square metres of data centre rack space.

IDA said the infrastructure will be top-class, with a dedicated on-site tri-generation plant to be built to meet the high power requirements of next-gen data centres. This will attract world-class Internet and media companies to host their content and services in Singapore.

And, if land space on diminutive Singapore runs dry, there's always the sea. Offshore data centres are likely to be the next big storage thing for the industry. According to the 2009 BroadGroup report, Google has recently filed a patent application for a water-based data centre, where ocean waves and water are to be used for power and cooling. Singapore's Keppel Corporation would be a forerunner to host such a centre: its offshore and marine division is the leader in floating storage construction, while its onshore facility, Keppel Digihub, is a major data centre operator.