Mayor Bloomberg at new consolidated data center in downtown Brooklyn (Photo Credit: Edward Reed)
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — A new 18,000 square-foot data center in downtown Brooklyn opened Monday, which is designed to consolidate the technology infrastructure of 19 agencies over the next year and that of more than 40 agencies over the next five years.
The facility’s opening comes just a couples weeks after the Obama administration issued its 2012 federal budget proposal where it asserted that data center consolidation and cloud computing will play a significant role in curbing IT costs.
The new consolidated data center will cost the city $11.7 million in equipment fees and another $2.7 million a year to lease the space at the MetroTech Center, but will ultimately help the city save about $100 million over the five-year period alone.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, deputy mayor for operations Stephen Goldsmith and department of information technology and telecommunications commissioner Carole Post were at the ceremony Monday.
The Citywide IT Infrastructure Services Program will reduce New York City’s IT infrastructure footprint, provide a unified set of shared IT services to city entities, reduce energy consumption, strengthen IT security and improve overall service quality for agencies through modernized technology infrastructure.
The consolidation effort is part of Deputy Mayor Goldsmith’s NYC Simplicity initiative to make city government more efficient, more innovative and more customer-focused.
“New York City is constantly employing new technology to improve and modernize services for New Yorkers, but until now the infrastructure behind that technology has been fragmented,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “By consolidating the IT operations of more than 40 City agencies, we’ll modernize the City’s technology infrastructure while saving taxpayers $100 million in the first five years alone. And by reducing the IT work done by individual City agencies, we’ll enable them to concentrate more of their resources on what they really do best: teaching students, protecting our neighborhoods, cleaning our streets, preventing and putting out fires, and doing all the other things that improve our quality of life.”
The consolidated IT infrastructure created through CITIServ will expand the existing shared services environment and enable DoITT to provide technology services for all City agencies, including modern, reliable, redundant, secure and green services at reduced costs.
So far, the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment’ IT operations, the Department of Sanitation’s IT Service Desk, and the Department of Education’s “HR Connect” application have all been moved into the consolidated CITIServ data center.
These systems alone support 140,000 users, and their consolidation will achieve a recurring annual savings of about $200,000.
In addition, ongoing consolidation work at the Department of Finance and the Department of Citywide Administrative Services will save several million dollars as a result of certain targeted migrations and investment deferrals.
The technology infrastructure of more than 40 city agencies is projected to be consolidated by the end of 2014.
In addition to IT consolidation, CITIServ also provides for more effective collaboration and a unified citywide IT strategy to better serve the City’s many businesses, visitors, and residents.
The city will share innovative operating systems, servers, development and collaboration tools across agencies to increase productivity among its programmers, developers and other IT resources by reducing the need to purchase, support and maintain new hardware at the individual agency level.
Tthe CITIServ program offers application hosting services, network services, data and storage services, collaboration services, and Citywide Service Desk.
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