More than 3300 data centers have been closed by the US government
It seems that the huge Hydra in the federal government data center has finally been subdued. According to the 2014 Federal Information Technology Procurement Reform Act (FITARA Act), many data centers have been closed, but the new data centers seem to be out of control, just like the legendary hydra heads. Now, the clarified instructions and a new memorandum have clearly implemented freezing orders for some kinds of new data centers and urged them to migrate to public cloud and private cloud services.
Guided by the Federal Data Center Consolidation Plan (FDCCI) in 2010 and the Federal Information Technology Procurement Reform Act (FITARA) in 2014, some government departments have closed more than 3300 data centers, saving the federal government an estimated 2.8 billion dollars.
Annual inspection
In addition to facilitating the closure of unnecessary federal government data centers, FITARA also requires government departments to submit the following information annually:
Fully inventoried data center assets
Multi year strategy to consolidate and optimize data centers
Performance indicators
Work schedule of government departments
Estimated inputs and cost savings per year
In order to prevent the notorious data center Hydra from rising again, FITARA also requires the administrative officials of the e-government and information technology office to:
Formulate and issue cost saving and optimization improvement regulations
Inform the public about the cumulative cost saving and optimization improvement
Review data center assets of government departments
Develop and implement data center management strategy
This led to the Data Center Optimization Plan (DCOI), which is expected to save an additional $1.4 billion by the end of fiscal 2018. DCOI proposes that all government departments (including the Ministry of Defense) that comply with the Chief Financial Officer Act of 1990 should meet the requirements of FITARA in data center consolidation and optimization.
As for who is responsible, the DCOI proposal mentioned that "all data center infrastructure and services (including contracts for third-party data centers and services for the entire government department) will be managed by CIOs of various government departments and ensure compliance with FITARA."
Significant changes
Next, the DCOI proposal proposed specific content and outlined the requirements for government departments. Some notable changes include encouraging migration to cloud computing and shared services.
The federal government, specifically the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), implemented the Cloud First Policy in 2010, which is part of the 25 key points plan aimed at reforming the federal government's information technology management. The idea behind "cloud priority" is to use commercial cloud technology in appropriate places, build government private clouds in unsuitable places, and use regional clouds with state and local governments when appropriate.
Shutting down a data center means figuring out how to handle the workload handled by a data center that has been shut down or is about to be shut down. In order to be consistent with the cloud priority policy, DCOI proposed: "Migrate to configuration services as far as possible, including configurable and flexible technologies, such as software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS)."
If the workload is not suitable for cloud services, DCOI suggests migrating the workload to the shared services between government departments, managed data centers, or more effectively optimized data centers within government departments.
As for shared services, the DCOI proposal explains that the General Services Administration (GSA) will supervise the shared services used by various government departments, maintain a market for shared services, and coordinate shared services between government departments.
Optimize data center facilities: the first thing that the drafter of the proposal did was to replace the current classification standard of data centers and change the core and non core data centers into hierarchical and non hierarchical data centers. The tiered data center will have the following parts:
Separate space for IT infrastructure
UPS system
Independent cooling system
Standby generator in case of long-term power failure
DCOI classifies all data centers that do not meet the above specifications into non tiered data centers.
Automatic energy monitoring, specifically the power use efficiency (PUE) indicator will be used for the first time. The proposal mentioned: "CIOs of government departments need to ensure that the existing hierarchical data centers reach and maintain a PUE of less than 1.5 before September 30, 2018. All new data centers must implement advanced energy metering mechanisms, and their design and operation standards require that the PUE be kept at a level not higher than 1.4, and encourage the PUE obtained by the design and operation standards not higher than 1.2."
In addition to the requirements for monitoring energy, the DCOI proposal also calls for automatic monitoring, management and asset inventory control of computing equipment. In addition, the utilization rate of equipment must reach or exceed the target value of 65%.
As with shared services, the General Affairs Administration is required to define a procurement path for all government departments that want to purchase the infrastructure management system of the data center.
DCOI target indicators
The drafter of the proposal mentioned: "OMB is responsible for using the detailed indicators and objectives of data center optimization, cost saving and closure, measuring the progress made by each government department every quarter, and evaluating through the data center asset inventory report submitted by each government department." The collected data will include the following:
All data center facility assets, closure/consolidation plans, and attributes of each data center owned, operated, or maintained by or on behalf of a government department.
Report clarifying the progress in meeting the target value of all optimization indicators.
Cost assessment of operating and maintaining data center
Develop annual target plans for cost savings and cost avoidance.
In addition to meeting the above objectives and indicators, the DCOI proposal also adds the following requirements:
"All government departments should reduce the annual government cost of the physical data center by at least 25% compared with the IT infrastructure expenditure data submitted to the federal government's IT dashboard in fiscal 2016 before the end of fiscal 2018. All government departments should jointly realize the cost savings of the following figures in each fiscal year of 2016, 2017 and 2018."
Cost savings expected after DCOI implementation
Incomplete data center shutdown
The federal government has not finished the work of closing the data center. "Judging from the number of data centers designated by government departments as having accepted the closure plan, government departments currently plan to close 22% of tiered data centers and 50% of non tiered non cloud data centers, which account for 44% of the total number of federal government data centers."
The long-term goal is to shut down all non tiered data centers. In addition, the drafters of the proposal believe that non tiered data centers (server rooms and cabinets) bring security risks, which may be a difficult problem in management, and they use resources inefficiently. By the end of fiscal 2018, 60% of all non tiered data centers will be closed.
Soliciting opinions
To sum up, the DCOI proposal is the latest version of data center consolidation and optimization requirements, and we hope to achieve further success on the basis of FDCCI and FITARA.
Having said that, the drafter of DCOI specially pointed out that the document has not yet been finalized, and OMB began to seek public opinions from March 2, with a 30 day window. If anyone is interested, they can provide feedback to datacenters.cio.gov.
The US Congress has taken note of the DCOI proposal. Frank, who writes for Nextgov. Frank Konkel mentioned Gerald, the Democratic representative of Virginia. Gerald Connolly is very excited about DCOI, and he strongly supports data center consolidation. Conker quoted Connolly as saying: "Without the permission of FCIO (Federal Chief Information Officer), you cannot build a new data center. Thank God."
