(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The US government has embarked on the largest data center consolidation in history in an effort to reduce the more than 1,100 data centers, according to a report by Data Center Knowledge.
The announcement comes just a month after the UK government revealed that the UK public sector will soon consolidate hundreds of separate data centers into 10 to 12 facilities.
In a memo sent out Friday, federal CIO Vivek Kundra revealed details of a new plan where federal agencies will be required to prepare an inventory of their IT assets by April 30 and develop an initial data center consolidation plan by June 30.
The agencies will then have to finalize the plans by December 31 and begin implementing them in 2011.
Kendra says the consolidation plans will be driven by energy cost reduction, helping to create significant business for companies providing energy efficiency tools and consulting.
The consolidation is also good for server vendors, as agencies will likely upgrade their hardware to increase computing power and energy efficiency.
The number of government data centers have nearly tripled over the past decade, going from 432 in 1999 to the more than 1,100 facilities today.
“This growth in redundant infrastructure investments is costly, inefficient and unsustainable and has a significant impact on energy consumption,” says Kundra. “In 2006 Federal servers and data centers consumed 6 billion kwH of electricity, and without a fundamental shift in how we deploy technology it could reach 12 billion kwH by 2012.”
In his Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative, Kundra specified four high-level goals including encouraging the use of green IT by lowering the overall energy and real estate footprint of government data centers, cutting down the cost of data center hardware, software and operations, increasing the overall IT security levels of the government, and investing in more efficient computing platforms and technologies.
No related posts.
