Skyrocketing costs at energy-hungry US federal government data centers have begun to attract criticism from within the federal bureaucracy’s ranks.
While private industry has been consolidating data centers for years, the federal government has been moving in the opposite direction. Since 1998, the number of government-run data centers has grown from 432 to nearly 2,100, according to Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra.
Kundra has been on a mission to reverse that trend and reduce what many agree has been a rampant duplication of data processing centers operated by federal agencies.
In the latest in a string of sharply worded remarks, Kundra announced on a White House blog on May 3 that federal agencies have pulled the plug on 39 data centers this year and are on track to close a total of 137 by the end of 2011.
Although Kundra has his eye primarily on IT savings that could be put to better use, each redundant data center also represents a significant amount of wasted energy costs at a time when the White House and the Office of Management and Budget are mandating energy savings across the federal government.
A data center uses 10 to 100 times more energy than a typical office space of the same size. Collectively, federal data centers and servers are projected to consume in excess of 12 billion kwh of electricity in 2011, twice what was used in 2006, according to an EPA report to Congress. The EPA estimated that federal data centers account for 10 percent of the electricity consumed by all data centers and servers nationally.
Typically, more than half the power used by a data center goes to supporting the center’s infrastructure, including cooling systems, power distribution losses and lighting, rather than running the computer equipment itself.
The rise in agency computing demands has spawned a “proliferation of infrastructure,” Kundra said that “enables redundant systems and applications to sprout like weeds.”
While some agency data centers are little more than a few racks of computer servers stuffed in an office utility room, many others are like the one operated by the Department of Health and Human Services in Rockville, Maryland, which is slated to shut down this year. The 14,992 square feet facility, until recently, housed 218 racks of servers and consumed $1.2 million annually for electricity.
Because many data centers chronically use only a fraction of their computing capacity, consolidating federal data centers would reduce collateral energy costs as well as IT investments dramatically.
“In total, we plan to shut down at least 800 data centers, some 40 percent of our inventory over the next four and a half years,” Kundra said. “The consolidation of these data centers is expected to save over $3 billion.”
Achieving that goal won’t be easy. Data center closures are inevitably associated with job losses in many Congressional districts. And agency officials often argue that the services that rely on those data centers are often too critical to migrate to a shared data processing facility without incurring other costs.
Wyatt Kash is Editorial Director of Breaking Gov.
Launching in Spring 2011, Breaking Gov will provide the government workforce with a new blend of work-related news, data streams and information tools focusing primarily on the business and profession, rather than the politics, of government.
