Government Research Reports

Assessment of the 2010 Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (Sep 2010)

Driven by a 154 percent increase in the number of federal data centers from FY 1998 to FY 2009 and IT infrastructure spending of nearly 30 percent of its IT budget, the federal government has launched the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI). While some agencies have made progress in consolidation, lack of funding, inadequate planning time, and insufficient resources present major obstacles to this initiative being the game-changing program that it could be. Rather, FDCCI will primarily stimulate agencies to combine smaller server rooms and closets and look to make existing larger data centers more efficient and speed adoption of virtualization. However, over the long-term, re-architecting federal data centers will put the federal government on a faster trajectory to adopt cloud computing than would have otherwise been possible.

Description

In February 2010, Federal Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, announced the commencement of the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI) which is meant to quell the growth in the number data centers and to launch efforts toward reduced energy usage, IT cost reductions, and increased IT security. The goal of FDCCI is to make infrastructure spending more cost effective and shift some of the savings to IT support of mission areas.

To achieve consolidation goals, agencies will be employing the following consolidation approaches: decommissioning, centralization and site consolidation, virtualization, and cloud computing. At the same time, agencies must overcome the challenges of an abbreviated planning and implementation timeline, lack of upfront funding, technical obstacles, and cultural and political roadblocks.

INPUT’s Assessment of the 2010 Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative report examines agency data center trends and drivers, federal data center inventories and consolidation status by department, applicable technologies, and best practices.

As a key component of the report, INPUT conducted interviews with data center managers and CIO office contacts in federal agencies, to identify and understand the emerging trends, key drivers and obstacles, and specific agency plans for consolidation efforts.

Key Findings

INPUT draws upon its extensive expertise on the government IT industry to analyze the current status and future trends for the federal data center environment. Key themes emerging from INPUT research include: