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Technology: Federal Government to Cut 800 Data Centers with a Goal to Shrink to Just 3
Vivek Kundra, the first executive-branch CIO, in his final days on the job before taking a job at Harvard in August, announced a plan to cut the number of federal data centers from roughly 2000 today to 1200 over the next four years. In Kundra’s plan to move to the cloud, Kundra says that his optimal design for the government computing architecture would be to have only three data centers.
In a NY Times article, Kundra explains how by eliminating 800 data centers, the government will save billions of dollars and to free up significant amounts of real estate. But even 1200 data centers is a lot — in 1998, the US had only 498 data centers. Kundra said that over the last decade “redundant systems and applications sprouted like weeds, We need to shift resources away from duplicative systems and use them to improve the citizen experience.”
Kundra said that the current IT operations in the federal government are inefficient and are the result partly because of the way that money is appropriated to fund IT tasks. Kundra said that “The biggest problem is how we fund. If we don’t solve that, none of the other stuff matters, because in appropriations language agencies are forbidden from sharing money across the board, so that’s a pretty serious issue.” With a current budget of $80 billion, US federal IT is the world’s number one IT operation.
Closing down 800 data centers will save $3 billion a year, and since each data center consumes as much electricity as 200 homes, significant energy savings will also be realized.
Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, said that “The government is : a very large IT system and benefits from scale effects: common platforms, common services, common data architectures. Left to computer-scientist designs, you’d have one data center with a replicated data center; you’d have uniform fiber; everyone would have common platforms and so forth.”
