US Government is keen in going cloud with the “cloud first” policy, focusing on email and cloud storage. The government’s plan to further the effort in going cloud will be achieved by consolidating at least 800 of 2,094 data centers US-wide by 2015, according to US CIO Implementation Plan.
According to Data Center Knowledge, the consolidation will save $18.8 billion in IT budgets.
In 2011 alone, there will be 137 data centers shut down and shift the Feds workloads to more efficient data centers, including cloud computing platforms.
Public (including Cloud Business Review) can access the list of data centers that can be consolidated – including a public “dashboard” from which people can track the consolidation progress for transparency and accountability.
The list of data centers that have been closed and will be closed in the future has been publicly available from Data.gov.
Of all US government agencies, NASA is the most active so far, closing 13 of its 14 data centers.
Will this be a trend? Will this impact data center business?
I don’t know whether the data center industry will be affected by the US Gov’t plan, but I do know that the market will sustain the shifting trends in data centers. With old and tired data centers will be consolidated, demand for efficient and cloud-powered data centers is growing significantly.
How efficient are cloud data centers? According to IBM, a cloud data center can increase disk utilization by 30%, allowing businesses using such data centers to save more money.
So far, cloud computing and data centers work quite well, I suppose…
Image: renjith krishnan
