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By Mark Henricks
The first round of closings of federal data centers has
landed, with Federal CIO Vivek Kundra announcing at a Washington event that 39
data centers have already closed, and 98 more will be shuttered by the end of
the year. The news represents the first significant progress on Kundra’s
announced goal of shutting down 800 of the more than 2,000 federal data
centers.
The total amount of closed data center space comes to
325,000 square feet. All the details of which centers have been closed or will
close weren’t clear, because about half of them belong to the Department of
Defense and the locations of those weren’t disclosed. However, a third of those
already closed are said to belong to NASA, and about 15 of the total already
closed are in the Washington, D.C., area, according to The
Washington Post.
Another significantly affected agency is the Department of
Agriculture, which is closing 10 of its 43 data centers this year. Ultimately,
the Agriculture Department plans to operate only seven data centers, Bloomberg
quoted Kathleen Merrigan, Agriculture deputy secretary, as saying.
Servers in at least some of the closed centers are being
moved to other federal data centers, according to the Post. Kundra didn’t say
exactly which of the closed centers will have their servers replaced by
outsourced capacity delivered from cloud suppliers.
In other news, the federal government did detail some
specific moves and planned moves to the cloud. Kundra said at the same event
that 950,000 e-mail accounts in 100 e-mail systems servicing 15 federal agencies
have been identified as candidates to move to the cloud. On May 10, Kundra
said, GSA will begin a competition to award $2.5 billion worth of federal cloud
contracts.
The General Services Agency and the Agriculture Department
are two that have announced that they will move their e-mail systems to cloud
suppliers. Agriculture Department is said to have already transferred 17,000
accounts to the cloud. It anticipates moving 120,000 by the end of 2011.
Cost savings is cited as the biggest reason for data center
consolidation and moving services to cloud suppliers. For example, Kundra said
one of the closed centers, a 15,000-square-foot Department of Health and Human
Services facility in Maryland, costs $1.2 million a year for electricity.
Overall, the federal government’s IT budget is about $80 billion a year. Kundra
has targeted shaving $20 billion off that.
Another motivation is increased security. Bloomberg quoted
Kundra as saying the closed centers represented a “huge security threat.” The
problem, according to Kundra, is that federal agencies weren’t adequately
keeping track of their data centers. The implication is that it will be easier
to track and secure a smaller number of data centers.
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