Issue 9, April/May 10
FOCUS US PUBLIC SECTOR CONSOLIDATION
QUESTIONS HANG OVER THE US GOVERNMENT’S
LATEST EFFORT TO CONSOLIDATE DATA CENTERS Despite several attempts to restrict growth, the US government’s infrastructure has more than doubled in the past decade. This time, however, cloud computing may be one solution
T
he notion that data center consolidation can bring big savings – which private companies are increasingly acting on – is not lost
on those working in the US public sector. Government leaders on the federal, state and city levels have recently issued assertive directives to providers of IT services to government agencies to consolidate their data centers and increase energy efficiency of their infrastructure.
The directive that is likely to make the biggest splash for the industry came in the form of a memo from US federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, to all federal agency CIOs, setting deadlines for assessing their data center assets and developing plans of action to reduce their footprints. The final plans have to be in by the end of August 2010. Kundra did not include a deadline for implementing the plans in his memo.
Making heavy weather of it?
PAST EFFORTS This is not the first major push to consolidate the US federal government’s data center infrastructure. Also, many individual agencies have undertaken consolidation efforts themselves and several have ongoing consolidation projects. While there have been several centralised top-down directives to consolidate, evidence suggests they have had little success.
A US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report to Congress in 2007 said federal data centers consumed about six-billion kWh annually, costing $450m. If nothing changed, the government’s data center power costs in 2011 would be about $740m, with a peak load of about 1.2GW, the report predicted.
It recommended aggressive consolidation of servers and storage, a technology refresh, which included buying the most energy-efficient IT equipment, adopting power management strategies, and increasing efficiency of the power and cooling infrastructure.
The EPA’s long list of recommendations included developing a procurement specification for energy efficiency of
outsourced data centers, separate metering of all federal data centers, and charging all government data center tenants for energy consumed by their IT equipment.
Prior to the EPA’s report, in 1995, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a bulletin to the heads of all executive departments with guidelines for consolidation. This memo was, in turn, inspired by another report, which predated it by two years.
Reengineering Through Information Technology was prepared in 1993 by the National Performance Review, a taskforce which President Bill Clinton’s administration created at the time to reform the way in which government operates. One of the recommendations the report made was to “consolidate and modernise government data processing centers”.
OMB’s 1995 bulletin gave departments two years to consolidate, and a lot of discretion in deciding how and what they will consolidate, requiring only that the plans they make are cost-effective and provide best value. The
agency suggested that savings a consolidated operation could achieve would range between 30% and 50%.
The office suggested there would not be much in terms of extra funding for the efforts, asking agencies to make their plans revenue- neutral, using the savings they achieve to fund themselves. There was, however, a provision for agencies to include authorisation language for financing the efforts in their budgets.
Like Kundra’s most recent memo, the 1995 bulletin set deadlines for conducting an inventory, preparing a consolidation strategy and developing an implementation plan. But OMB also gave agencies an implementation deadline, which would come in less than three years.
Kundra’s numbers, however, suggest the goals OMB set 15 years ago have not been realised. The number of federal data centers mushroomed from 432 in 1998 to more than 1,100 in 2009. The figures came from OMB itself.
UNFUNDED MANDATES One key barrier to successful federal
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