Issue 3, April 2009
FOCUS GOVERNMENT
Government Data Centers: COULD EVOLUTION BE DYING OUT?
It seems like only yesterday that the chief executive of the Office of Government Commerce, Sir Peter Gershon, proposed a 1% efficiency improvement every year in government services. In fact, it was May 2004. So has anyone been demonstrating this successfully in the UK? And what lessons can we learn from the US’s faster-moving economy?
T
he need to rationalise Britain’s vast government computing infrastructure has led some data center managers to make almost
sacrilegious proposals. Instead of replicating hundreds of identical data centers for every council and every government department, why not simply pool resources? In theory, if all the metropolitan councils for one region run very similar applications, couldn’t they all be hosted on one giant machine that can be virtualised?
This has always been possible, but not always practical – mostly for political reasons. In London, for example, the councils of two neighbouring inner city boroughs are as polarised as it is possible to be, without hostilities breaking out.
Labour-run Lambeth Council, for example, and Conservative-run Wandsworth may share
responsibility for Cavendish Road, but that’s the limit of their willingness to collaborate. IT directors may not think like that, but council bosses certainly wouldn’t want their data housed on the same server.
However, there is evidence of growing maturity in the public sector and a realisation that costs could be cut without budgets being slashed. The strategies of some of these beacons of good practise differ, but their examples are educational. It’s evident, however, that we have some way to go to catch up with the US (see box, ‘US data center transformation’), where fiscal stimulus could create massive efficiencies in public sector computing.
In the UK, the move to collocation is a slow evolution. A number of councils in the west of London (such as Hillingdon, Hammersmith and Fulham, Brent and Ealing) have started working together to share experience, but
despite the raging consumption of their IT departments still haven’t taken collaboration to its fullest conclusion.
“We’re not driven towards colocation just yet,” says Roger Bearpark, head of ICT at Hillingdon Council, “but it might be a boon to us if we were to work with other local authorities.” Though Bearpark claims that Hillingdon is not likely to run out of space and power anytime soon, he says: “We need to be smarter about how we manage data.”
The council has taken brave and unpopular decisions before, though. Back in 2006, when virtualisation was in its infancy, Bearpark took his career in his hands and pioneered a virtualisation project. Drastic action was forced on him to some extent.
Hillingdon found itself running out of server space and these power-hungry machines
www.datacenterdynamics.com 27
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