Some government agencies, including the U.S. Department of the Interior, have announced plans to consolidate their data centers and IT resources. The main reasons seem to point to the government’s bottom line and an effort to eliminate waste. According to a report released by MeriTalk (sponsored by NetApp), federal agencies have the potential of cutting IT-related expenditures by $18.8 billion if they consolidate their data centers.
Although consolidation looks good in the budget books, it will certainly impact government data centers and the services they offer. So what will be the end result of consolidation? And what will the reality look like?
Consolidate What?
Peggy Canale, government segment manager for Emerson Network Power’s Avocent business (www.emersonnetworkpower.com), says federal agencies act autonomously, even though there are many applications that are consistent across the government. As a result, Canale says the mechanisms used for funding various agencies and their capital expenditures have forced the development of IT silos. She comments, “The administration seeks to reduce duplicative and complex systems, increase asset utilization, and bring federal IT on par with the private sector. Collectively, agencies are striving to close 800 data centers by 2015.”
However, it is worth noting, says Canale, that the definition the government used to report the number of federal data centers actually includes what many in the industry would classify as computer rooms, server racks, and network closets. “That being said, the number of actual data centers is significantly smaller and is not out of control,” she says.
According to Eitan Bremler, director of product marketing, virtualization, and cloud solutions at Radware (www.radware.com), organizations are implementing data center consolidation strategies in order to reduce costs and improve availability and resilience of their data centers. He explains, “Through the process of data center consolidation, organizations also take the opportunity to not only consolidate multiple data centers into fewer centers, but also to implement consolidation of different networking and server layers within the data center, such as the ADC (application delivery controller) layer.”
Why Consolidate?
Canale says consolidation is useful because it makes the hundreds of thousands of diverse ICT (information communication technology) assets and applications hosted on them much easier to account for. She adds, “It also allows better economies of scale and pushes the data center into high-performance computing architecture to take advantage of assets. It provides a path to server, storage, and network reductions; increased use of virtualization; and perhaps most importantly, a significant reduction in energy consumption, real estate, software licenses, and manpower.”
However, Canale says, shockingly, many agencies did not know how much or where their hardware and software resources were deployed. She notes, “The problem of not knowing what the data center infrastructure looks like is enormous. Without insight into the infrastructure, there is no way to be cloudready for agencies wishing to implement private or hybrid clouds. When the administration announced their second strategy, ‘Cloud First,’ federal agencies had to have an accurate accounting of resources.” She says even for those not moving to cloud, consolidation offers the opportunity to reduce complexity by removing older generations of hardware.
Bremler says consolidation offers several benefits. “First, it helps reduce hardware and operational costs. Second, IT departments can use the savings to invest in new and robust data center technologies that will help improve data center reliability with resources concentrated on fewer centers. Last, the manageability of the data centers is improved since fewer locations and infrastructures have to be managed,” he says.
Consolidation Impact
In Bremler’s opinion, the impact will be felt in improved reliability of the data centers and services, but more interestingly, it will impact the technologies applied in data centers, especially through the consolidation of different data center layers. He adds, “This consolidation requires new technologies such as ADC consolidation and virtualization technologies or networking consolidation technologies. I believe we will start to see more virtualization technologies within the consolidated data centers.”
For Canale, the federal government will need to update its IT infrastructures to handle the higher loads, and reliance on high availability architecture will increase. She says DCIM (data center infrastructure management) tools could help efficiently manage the assets, user requirements, energy loads, and virtualization.
Ultimately, however, Canale says if the consolidation effort is achieved as planned, the federal government will see better service in a more secure environment and will be able to provide more value for the American taxpayer. “Over time, the federal consolidation effort will help enable more private or hybrid cloud offerings,” she says. “Additionally, some of the routine cross-government applications, like email, will move to public cloud offerings.”
What To Expect
One of the Office of Management and Budget’s goals, according to Canale, is to see server utilization move from 30% (which is typical of many agencies) to the 60 to 70% range. The other goals are to align federal technology with best practices from the private sector. But the problem, she says, is twofold: The budget crisis could reduce, delay, or outright cancel programs to modernize data centers, and the federal acquisition process is often at odds with timely best practices from the private sector.
Canale continues, “It is too early to tell the results of the consolidation efforts. However, recent survey results from federal IT executives indicate their doubt about the ability to meet the 800 data center consolidation goal. Per the request from the Office of Management and Budget, we will be able to see how agencies will integrate consolidation plans into their FY12 budget submission. However, it’s possible that the end result could resemble commercial colocation data centers with many tenants, intra- and interagency, either leasing hardware and managed services or supplying their own and leveraging support infrastructure and services.”
Bremler says overall, data center consolidation will drive a reduction in operational and capital costs and improve manageability of the center. He says in reality, the level of consolidation will determine how the new data center will look. He concludes, “As more and more consolidation and virtualization are implemented, we will see fewer physical hardware devices.