Practical Analysis: Lessons From 5 Years of Data Center Consolidation Delays
Fusion PPT’s article “Practical Analysis: Lessons From 5 Years of Data Center Consolidation Delays,” written by CEO Michael Biddick, has been featured in the June 10th, 2013 issue of InformationWeek. Biddick, who has authored a book on “Federal Cloud Computing” and written over 50 articles on cloud-related topics, provides his observations and lessons-learned on making data center consolidation efforts more efficient.
Consolidation of federal data centers is an on-going issue. The U.S. Government has reportedly more than 3,100 data centers and $9.1 billion worth in applications, which are extremely costly to maintain. And yet, for all that cost, these data centers do not provide sufficient resource-sharing across or within agencies. The Government created the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative back in 2010 to increase efficiency in fewer data centers, and to lower costs and energy consumption; however progress has been slow, says Biddick. “Obviously, data center consolidation is more difficult than anyone expected it to be, a reality I’ve seen firsthand while working on the effort. The problems aren’t unique to the public sector. A lack of record keeping and plain old resistance to change are universal human traits.”
The current Federal plan is to close 1,253 data center facilities by the close of 2015; however, even after years of planning, “only the Department of Commerce has been deemed to have a complete plan to tackle the problem,” remarks Biddick. That begs the question: why has there been so little progress and what can we learn from this effort?
To tackle this problem, Biddick provides several key pieces of insight in his article on what organizations (and the Federal Government) could do better in regard to meaningful data center consolidation.