US Government Begins Largest IT Consolidation in History

miller60 writes "Saying 1,100 data centers is too many, the federal government has begun what looms as the largest IT consolidation in history. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has directed federal agencies to inventory their assets by April 30 and prepare a plan to reduce the number of servers and data centers, with a focus on slashing energy costs (full memo). Kundra says some applications may be shifted to cloud computing platforms customized for government use."

Better not use Northrop Grumman

[r_jensen11]

If Virginia's IT overhaul [washingtonpost.com] is any indication [timesdispatch.com], this is going to be a slow-motion cluster of a mess [washingtontechnology.com] for the next 10-20 years

Re:Consolidate

[gestalt_n_pepper]

I know that as late as 1995, NASA still had some satellites that were still controlled by some Commodore 64s in a warehouse near White Sands, New Mexico.

I'm sure they've fixed that by now. Probably. Possibly.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Dear Contractors...

[hedwards]

I know you're joking, but it could go either way. Trying to manage, secure, track and backup the huge number of servers that the various agencies and departments use costs a pretty considerable amount of money to do right. Of course they haven't been doing it right up until now. Consolidating into a smaller number of server farms that are somewhat spread through the US has definite potential in terms of dealing with those factors more efficiently. That being said, we won't know until it happens, there's still plenty of ways for pork and waste to creep into the equation.

History to Repeat Itself?

[lax-goalie]

I have no problem with the CONCEPT of consolidation, but Virginia's IT outsourcing/consolidation project to Northrup Grumman happened on Kundra's watch. It is an unmitigated disaster.

Years into it, there's not even a complete inventory of the systems that NG is supposed to be managing for the Commonwealth, and at least as of a few months ago, NG couldn't even produce an invoice for the Commonwealth to pay that had more than six or eight line items on it.

I sat through a special meeting of the House Committee on Science and Technology on the issue a few months ago, and the legislature is NOT happy about the situation. Privately, you will hear from them words like "gross negligence" to "I'm convinced it's corruption". The Delegates who engineered the legislation enabling the IT outsourcing are especially pissed.

No disrespect to Kundra, but I don't think he's the right guy to oversee it.

Re:IT as a commodity

[eln]

I agree with the government's effort to consolidate, because you can take advantage of cheaper per-gigabyte costs and have more robust backup, recovery, disaster recovery, and redundancy solutions when you're using enterprise equipment in large data centers. I think the government has a lot to gain from consolidation in this manner.

However, I don't see that they'd have much to gain by outsourcing. Government data, by nature, is quite a bit more sensitive than just about any private company's data. The kind of security the government needs is not going to come cheaply, and it's arguable that any private company is really capable of providing it (although they say they are). Even if they can provide it, it's doubtful they can do it cheaper than the government could. For people in need of true commodity services like web hosting, outsourcing makes sense because it can be done far cheaper that way. For people in need of large-scale custom solutions, like the government, keeping it in-house is going to tend to be both more secure and less expensive.

Re:Better not use Northrop Grumman

[Anonymous Coward]

If Virginia's IT overhaul [washingtonpost.com] is any indication [timesdispatch.com], this is going to be a slow-motion cluster of a mess [washingtontechnology.com] for the next 10-20 years

Let's not forget that Vivek Kundra was Virginia's CIO when that fiasco took place. I predict that this will be at least as bad as the Virginia situation.

Re:Better not use Northrop Grumman

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you are mistaking him with Anesh Chopra (Chief Technology Officer). I see Kundra (Chief Information Officer) as having been the Secretary of Commerce and Trade for Virgina

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivek_Kundra [wikipedia.org]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneesh_Chopra [wikipedia.org]

Re:Dear Contractors...

[ArcadeX]

I work on the DoT network, and this thought scares me. Please remember the lowest bidder gets the job in most cases, we recently started putting VM servers in, and these guys can't even reboota a virtual server without screwing it up. As a regional subcontractor, I'm completely locked out, to the point that I had to spend 10 minutes on the phone with our official helpdesk explaining the runas command in windows to the guy on the other end so he could run a command I don't have access to...

Re:Dear Contractors...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There are, absolutely undeniably, substantial economies of scale in IT at virtually every step of the game. Hardware gets cheaper as it is produced in greater volume, software costs serious cash to write but nothing to copy, small shops might have a 1/25 admin/server ratio because the minimum number of admins is 1(.5 admins just lie on the floor oozing organ goo) while large ones might have a 1/10,000 ratio plus a few screwdriver monkeys.

And, honestly, I'd be delighted if the feds can realize some of those economies. I'm sure that there are plenty of grossly inefficient little fiefdoms out there, just waiting to be consolidated.

My concern is twofold: one is that there are non-obvious potential diseconomies of scale(and not just because this is the evil gummin't with its waste and corruption, a lot of the good stories are private sector). Centralization and standardization are all well and good until you end up waiting three weeks and submitting petitions in triplicate just to get some software installed or setting changed, and don't even think about setting up a little wiki or git repo or something for your team with approval from a half dozen departments.

The second issue is, of course, concern over the government contracting process, regulatory capture, revolving door incentives, outright corruption, and whatnot. The magical efficiency of the private sector isn't going to do us a whole lot of good if the project ends up as a cost-plus job for SAIC [wikipedia.org] or one of the other byzantine contracting behemoths that specialize in landing(and on occasion even fulfilling) contracts.

Re:Prediction

[Sandbags]

I don't know, we started with a network of well over 3,000 servers, and in less than 2 years we've moved almost entirely off Win 2K, virtualized over 1,000 servers, moved to AIX 6 and VIO, delpoyed a VMWare infrastructure, deployed an Exchange architecture in place of a legacy e-mail system, and converted more than half our web apps into SOA and put it on IFLs in a mainframe. We cut from over 3,000 systems, nearly all physical, to under 2500 with near half virtual, and saved significant money in the process vs budgeted outlays. We've reduced our data center footprint by 60-70%, and our power draw is down dramatically.

The forward looking TCO now that the bulk of the migrations are done is impressively smaller.

We did all this while holding to DOD network standards.

The problem the government will have, which we fought with a bit but was no where near as big of a deal, is getting hundreds of small business units to agree to consolidate to central systems, and to convert from "these servers are mine, see, here's where I paid for them" to a metered utilization budget system where hardly any smaller government agency owns it's own infrastructure.

Re:Nixon.

[Buelldozer]

Nixon took us off the gold standard during the Civil War? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard#Suspension_of_the_gold_standard [wikipedia.org]

THAT BASTARD!

Re:Nixon.

[Chris Mattern]

Nixon took us off the gold standard during the Civil War?

Don't you know yourself no history? He did it during the Great Depression! [youtube.com]