Fed Data Center Efforts Move To Execution PhaseFed Data Center Efforts Move To Execution Phase

The multi-year, federal government-wide data center consolidation initiative is shifting from planning to execution as federal agencies tie their finalized consolidation plans into larger budget plans due to the Office of Management and Budget this week and begin tackling easy data center consolidation wins, the effort's leader said last week.

In an information Government Webcast, "Quick Wins in Data Center Consolidation," data center consolidation initiative leader and Department of Homeland Security CIO Richard Spires laid out the government's future plans and goals for the initiative, discussed what agencies should be doing now, and gave an update on DHS' own data center consolidation initiative.

Spires said he will be working closely with the Office of Management and Budget to help institute baseline plans for each agency by the end of the quarter, and then oversight of the effort will transition into a monitoring mode. As the initiative progresses, agencies will update their asset inventories and report their progress annually, and will be expected to update plans each year as well. "This is not something that's going to be completed in a year," Spires said, pointing to DHS' own effort to consolidate from 24 down to two data centers, which began three years ago and isn’t slated to be finished until 2014.

The recent departure of former data center consolidation co-leader and Treasury CIO Mike Duffy to join the Department of Justice has left Spires as the government's point person for the initiative, while OMB continues to play a major role. However, as agencies move from planning into execution, Spires also sees a new role for the federal CIO Council (the government's principal interagency IT forum, consisting of agency and bureau CIOs) to play.

Spires said he wants to stand up a CIO Council subcommittee as part of the council's best practices committee -- which Spires chairs -- that will focus on best practices of data center consolidation, providing among other things help and access to experts and IT managers who have consolidated in the past. "Planning is critical, but success all depends on the execution," he said.

Spires pointed to four primary goals of the data center initiative, including: promoting the use of green IT by reducing energy use and the government data center real estate footprint; reducing overall capital and operational data center costs; increasing the use of more efficient computing platforms and technologies; and increasing the overall IT security posture of government.

He said that OMB would make the call as to whether there will be any specific benchmarked objectives, wasn't able to discuss any as of now. OMB has been analyzing agencies' data center inventories and preliminary plans over the past several months.

In terms of concrete plans, those will generally be up to the agencies themselves, but Spires said that the government will also consider instituting shared services where they may make sense. For example, he said, "If we have a significant number of data centers in a particular city, we may bring those agencies together and talk about where it would make sense to consolidate within even a smaller number of data centers that would be housing apps from within multiple agencies."

For now, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit just at the individual agencies. In particular, Spires said, agencies should be looking at where cloud computing makes sense and accelerating their use of virtualization technologies. "I'm excited about some of the offerings coming to the fore from commercial providers as well as the price points on things like email-as-a-service," he said. "The ability to outsource those in the near-term I going to be compelling, particularly for smaller agencies who could then redeploy their own infrastructure to work on more mission-critical applications and IT needs."

In terms of its own efforts, DHS is further along in data center consolidation than most other federal agencies. It has already shuttered six of its 24 data centers, with the goal of consolidating down to two by 2014. Rack occupancy in those data centers has been steadily increasing over the past two years, and a dedicated team is working with DHS components to facilitate migration.

DHS has begun offering and planning additional enterprise services, including email and a virtual development and test environment, that will run in those newly consolidated data centers. It's also published a service catalog for data center services and hired customer service reps as it shifts its focus to providing more services for DHS' 22 bureaus and sub-agencies. In addition, Spires said, the agency wants to build out a new operations center for the overall management and operations of the data centers, though that is still in early phases.

The agency is also considering cloud computing hand-in-hand as it continues moving forward with its consolidation effort. "For those types of apps that could be potentially in the cloud, we are certainly looking at the cost benefit of whether or not we should move those applications to our own data centers or into cloud-based services," Spires said. He recently compared the pricing and security of cloud email and internal email services before deciding the DHS could manage email at a low cost and high security internally, and said that DHS is looking at cloud providers for web hosting.