Feds Meet the Data Center and Cloud Computing

March 2nd, 2010 by Larissa Fair

Virtualization has come of age this year with more and more companies using the technology for server consolidation (and cost cutting) projects. The federal government is taking that a massive step forward with plans to consolidate more than 1,100 data centers, and cloud computing will have a major role in how this is achieved. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra is asking federal agencies to prepare an inventory of their assets before April 30. Kundra targets having a consolidation plan due by June 30 which will then be finalized by the end of the year. This is a major IT initiative for 2011 set forth by the Obama administration earlier this year, and the OMB will be working with agencies to reduce the size and cost of current data centers.

As for enterprises, this move makes sense on many different levels. Consolidating data centers will greatly decrease high costs of keeping up over 1,000 data centers and enable the government to act in a more efficient manner when it comes to their IT operations management. Running all these data centers requires over six billion kilowatt hours of energy (estimated to reach 12 billion kwH by 2012), and as is too often the case, the data centers are heavily underutilized. Some estimates by Kundra state that the data centers are using only 15-20% of their capacity. With virtualization and cloud computing, that’s a lot of room for improvement.

Need additional proof that a change is needed?  Information Week says this:

…in a smaller survey carried out last year, OMB discovered that the number of data centers has ballooned more than 150% in the last dozen years from 432 in 1998 to 1,100 in 2009. According to Kundra, agencies are only using 15 to 20% of the capacity of many of their data centers.

This initiative has large implications for service providers of data centers to the government- in particular it signals a major shift of IT investments to public and private clouds. Some agencies are already utilizing private clouds.

We’ll be interested to see what our own survey results say at FOSE about this new initiative. Will agencies be compliant and work towards a better goal? How will cloud computing impact agencies’ plans to consolidate their resources? And how fast will this happen? Our survey last year showed that cloud computing was at the very bottom of the list of important technologies; stay tuned for this year’s survey results because we’re betting they will be very different.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Related Posts

• No Related Post

4 comments