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By Mark Henricks
Lack of money and lack of time mean that meaningful
consolidation of federal data centers is likely a decade away, according to new
report from INPUT. The authors of “Assessment
of the 2010 Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative” talked to data
center managers and contacts in federal agency CIO offices to prepare the
study, which stopped short of major criticism of the federal initiative’s
designers, but left little room for optimism that it would succeed as planned.
The Federal
Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI) was announced in February 2010
by federal CIO Vivek Kundra. The effort is intended to promote green IT, shrink
energy use, cut the amount of real estate used by government data centers,
lessen costs, improve security and boost efficiency.
What spurred the initiative, according to INPUT, was a 154
percent increase in the number of federal data centers from 1998 to 2009. Today
there are about 1,1000 federal data centers. During the period, federal data
center infrastructure expenses grew to account for 30 percent of government IT
spending, and represented a significant amount of energy consumption, as well, INPUT
said.
The directive instructed agencies to employ decommissioning,
centralization, site consolidation, virtualization and cloud computing in their
efforts to comply. INPUT said private-sector vendors could supply many of the
tools and know-how to accomplish the goal. But the federal effort also suffers
from significant problems, the report concluded.
The biggest problem is probably lack of upfront funding.
INPUT noted that it takes money to relocate data centers into consolidated
facilities. While savings may eventually pay for these costs, they have to be
paid for now, the report noted. Other problems include technical challenges,
cultural and political issues, and the accelerated timeline.
Agencies were instructed to conduct an initial inventory of
data center assets by April 30,2010, develop and
initial data center
consolidation plan by June 30, 2010, and have final data center consolidation
plans in 2012 fiscal year budgets, due August 30,2010.
As a result, INPUT concluded, agencies will focus on
consolidating small centers and server rooms while optimizing larger data
centers. The key technology solution will be virtualization including cloud
computing.
While the ultimate goals may be achieved eventually,
short-term the improvements will be modest, INPUT said. “This initiative
propels the government in the right direction, but not at a revolutionary
pace,” according to Angie Petty, INPUT analyst and author of the report.
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