US Government Begins Largest IT Consolidation in History 283
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."
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:IT as a commodity (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not quite sure what you are talking about. Because everyone has access to yesteryear's supercomputer on their desktop, there is no reason whatever to go back to a 1960s outsourcing model. If you want to distribute load over your machines, go ahead! But why do it over someone else's?
If you think this is going to reduce IT expenditure requirements, you have barely worked a minute in IT. When you outsource, you are simply paying someone else to do your job, plus profit, plus a gaggle of negotiators in middle management collecting their kickbacks, plus downtime costs because your business is less important to them than your business is to you (if you have enterprise e-mail and it has been down more than, say, GMail, you have done something very wrong)...
Nice idea in theory... (Score:4, Interesting)
Now just wait for a data center to be scheduled to close in some Congressman's home district and see how big of a block is put into place.
Free software and owned infrastructure (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Where do I send my resume? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is no joke. I work at one of the biggest government data centers, and we consider Google to be alternately either our best friend or the people who will put us out of business. Google is our biggest domestic consumer -- I think they've already sucked down all the data we have here on site. I could easily see them positioning themselves to take over the ingesting and archiving responsibilities.
Google likely already has a copy of all the nonclassified data that the government is holding. The only people with more appetite for data are the Chinese. If the government decides to outsource data centers, that's where they'll be going.
Re:... if you can spell "Cloud Computing" (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:Better not use Northrop Grumman (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course it is
consolidations are always a mess and ones full of job implications mean political interference (I want em in my district).
But you have to do something as the growth of government IT gets out of hand and we can only afford so much.
IIRC, the government consolidated all the payroll systems it had into about 4 pay centers back about 10 years ago. Went from maintaining hundreds to one s/w run 4 places for redundancy. Everybody screamed they needed theirs because it had unique features, they learned to do without or incorporated the features into the new s/w. Wasn't that fairly successful?
While all govt computing is a bit more complex now than a single application was then, still if we are to afford the things we really need, consolidation and standardization makes sense.
Now the contracting and execution...that will be a challenge. And so what if it takes 5 years, if we are going in the right direction and saving money in the long run. Because we can't sustain even the current government spending on what we are willing to vote as taxes.
Re:Prediction (Score:4, Interesting)
Here is another fun page [ieee.org]: "Most IT experts agree that such failures occur far more often than they should. What's more, the failures are universally unprejudiced: they happen in every country; to large companies and small; in commercial, nonprofit, and governmental organizations; and without regard to status or reputation."
I only question why, when large projects are almost universally over-budget or fail altogether, we persist in being surprised and outraged every time? The simple fact is, we don't know how to do it, any more than we know how to land on mars; that is, we can do it, sometimes, but you better know going in it is likely to end in tears.
(In general, it seems to me that most of the problems in government have direct parallels in private industry because they flow from the same underlying cause; the unaffordability of medicare/medicaid corresponds to skyrocketing premiums in the private market; social security corresponds to slashing pensions and now even 401k matches in private industry. But private industry does hold a trump card - they can always cut their losses by tossing people aside and moving on, whereas government is the safety net.)
Potential for massive savings (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:... if you can spell "Cloud Computing" (Score:3, Interesting)
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Good idea, but huge problems are coming (Score:5, Interesting)
I've actually done a lot of smaller server consolidation projects. In most cases, the results are great...those lonely database and file servers that get hits 5 or 6 times a day are all combined into one big box that actually uses all the hardware capacity.
The biggest problems I've seen with VMs are the project managers who treat it as magic, never-ending capacity. The new favorite phrase in IT project management circles seems to be, "Oh, we'll just build a VM for it." Problem is, unless someone else is hosting your data center, you can't just call up and order more capacity without paying for more hardware.
Second-biggest with a consolidation like this is incomplete requirements. Lowest-bidder contractors are not going to do a good job of gathering every single requirement...even high-bidder contractors have problems with this. And the problem is that the more they miss, the worse the fallout. A certain large company I used to work for found this out the hard way moving their inhouse data center to one of the big IT services companies. I'm a systems guy, and had all my stuff well documented. Others were pissed off they were losing their jobs and intentionally withheld information...the contractors didn't follow up, and a lot of last minute scrambling had to be done to complete the migration.
Third problem for a government IT consolidation? Some huge services company like Accenture or IBM is going to win the bid and staff the project with dumbasses they pulled off the street in order to maximize profits. (Yes, this happened in my case in point #2 above...the sales staff presented the A Squad and swapped them out as soon as the contract was signed.) Not that government employees are rockstars, but they at least have a vested interest in keeping the data safe. IBM will probably win the contract too, given their involvement with government systems already. IBM has been so India-happy over the last ten years that I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the (non security critical) work ends up there.
Just like PMs treat VMs as magic hardware, CIOs treat outsourcers as magic black boxes that flawlessly run their IT operations. Unfortunately, the reality is not as sunny beneath the surface!
Who is doing the work? (Score:1, Interesting)
STOP SENDING GOVERNMENT MONEY TO COMPANIES WHO OFFSHORE
I post this anonymously because I fear for my job. I need to pay my bills.
Re:Dear Contractors... (Score:3, Interesting)
I know this because I get 5 to 10 emails/week asking me to relocate to the DC area for jobs that I've already seen posted on Ratheon or NG's websites. I work with plenty of multinationals, and can easily tell English Grammar from an Indian perspective. Not all Indians speak or write poor English, just the recruiters that have contacted me regarding subcontracting for the Fed through NG and Raytheon.
Re:Free software and owned infrastructure (Score:2, Interesting)
despite my better judgement,
How in 10 years do you plan on reading those closed format autocad files of the long ago built government building? or moving them to the new system?
How about all the training docs in pdf reader 10 format when the current version is 293?
how about using that critical piece of software that needs activation servers, from a company that disappears suddenly in 4 years from now?
Now I would agree that allowing the free market to participate is a good idea, but if you are biding it should be a work for hire that gives all the source and toolchain requirments(sources for those too), source for any other software dependencies(their build chains, etc etc) and it should provide some way to output the data in a easy to parse format. Otherwise how can "we, the people" ensure that our government remains viable into the future and is able to archive the data.(no a laser printer output on bleached paper won't cut it).