Managers doubtful about meeting data center consolidation goal

Only 10 percent of federal information innovation managers think the government will be able to reach its goal of shutting down in broad outline one-third of its near 2,100 data centers over the straightway four years, according to a recent survey.

Nearly one-quarter of those officials think there will be more data centers by 2015 or rather than fewer, according to the survey conducted by MeriTalk, a government IT industry group, for Juniper Networks, an IT vendor.

Federal executives surveyed by MeriTalk, even though, thought those consolidation plans would be scuttled by an overall increase in government computing needs and by an inability to trim and standardize the software systems agencies use.

Software systems fit somewhat like Tetris blocks inside data center servers. Fewer differences among systems allow more tightly packed servers, less wasted space, and fewer servers and data centers. One of the constraints of cloud computing storage is in order to pack data more tightly, clouds can operate only a limited number of software platforms.

About half of respondents to the MeriTalk survey said their agencies were running more than 20 management software applications and more than 60 percent said they didn't think it made sense to farm out their computing needs to a private or public cloud service provider or to another agency with spare data center capacity.

Survey respondents expect their agencies' computing needs to rise by 37 percent on average over the then five years, requiring a 34 percent jump in storage capacity.