A chart that shows the obstacles hindering Federal data center consolidation.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Government business research firm INPUT (www.input.com) announced on Tuesday it has released the report that addresses the trends and technologies related to helping agencies meet the directives of the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative.
Entitled “Assessment of the 2010 Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative,” the report examines agency data center inventories, and summarizes select departments’ initiatives, applicable technologies, best practices, and their potential impact on IT spending.
Authored by INPUT manager of industry analysis Deniece Peterson and INPUT principal analyst Lauren Jones, the report includes information on which agencies to target for consolidation services and solutions and projected timelines for implementation.
FDCCI is aimed at data center contractors and addresses the increase of federal data centers’ infrastructure expenses, which comprise an average of 30 percent of government-wide IT spending and also pose a significant impact on energy consumption.
The initiative intends to reduce these trends by promoting the use of green IT and reducing hardware and operations costs.
It also emphasizes the need for overall information security, efficient computing solutions, and allocating cost savings to support mission-critical areas.
The report shows that agencies will focus on consolidating small centers/server rooms and optimizing larger data centers, virtualization – particularly cloud computing – will emerge as a key technology solution, and the lack of upfront funding is causing a major barrier to consolidation.
The US government began a major consolidation project in March to reduce the more than 1,100 data centers. In June, President Barack Obama ordered federal agencies to accelerate the process.
And while the report shows that contractors’ experience in applying private sector best practices to government needs could alleviate agencies’ concerns, it also emphasizes concerns about the timelines for implementation.
“This will likely become a decade-long process, although we expect some quick wins with agencies expanding their use of virtualization,” says Angie Petty, principal analyst at INPUT. “But changes that produce a large-scale reduction in an agency’s real estate footprint and other physical structure changes will take a lot of money and time. This initiative propels the government in the right direction, but not at a revolutionary pace.”
The report also provides a detailed overview of federal government data center inventories, including central processing unit utilization, power usage effectiveness ratios, and INPUT projections on the financial impact of consolidation on federal IT budgets over the next five years.
The data is delivered in Word format, and includes an executive briefing on PowerPoint, and an Excel workbook with data on the landscape and financial impact segments.
The report can be purchased at INPUT’s website here. INPUT will also host a webinar led by Jones and Petty on the 2010 Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative on September 30 at 2 p.m. EDT.
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