Feds Really Don’t Like Sharing Data Centers
The biggest challenge to the formation of a federal marketplace for exchanging data-center capacity among federal agencies has been a cultural one, the project manager for the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative said last week. Zach Baldwin, GSA program manager, Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, and the Cloud Computing PMO told a FierceGovernmentIT webinar about the challenge to close 40 percent of the federal government’s data centers, or roughly 1,200, by the end of 2015 as part of the FDCCI program. The government started out with 2000 data centers, eventually growing to about 3,133 by August. Baldwin said that 318 data centers were closed between fiscal year 2011 and 2012; 119 will be closed this fiscal year, with another 681 scheduled for shutdown by the end of fiscal 2013. An ongoing list is published at Data.gov, he said, adding that he can’t dictate which data centers get the axe. “We’re not naming data centers to close,” Baldwin said. “As soon as we get prescriptive, everyone gets very special, and there’s a lot of pushback.” The government’s goal is twofold: reduce cost by cutting down on the number of data centers, and increase their utilization through efficiencies like virtualization. Baldwin called the government’s data center use as a “very underutilized federal IT infrastructure,” one that it’s seeking to improve: “The days of buying an application, buying a server, turning it on, having the lights flashing, running at 5 percent utilization are pretty much over.”