Venyu Blog

Constant readers of this blog know that as recently as January 19^th (The Continuing Crisis) the Obama administration had made it abundantly clear that federal agencies were being “encouraged” to move from in-house tech deployments to the cloud. Obama cloud visionary CIO Vivek Kundra is under a formal (informal?) directive to help the government achieve its goal of reducing its current count of 2,100 data centers by 40 percent come 2015, or the equivalent of some 800 data centers.

Now comes word just this week that the U.S. Navy has frozen new server purchases as a means to comport its conduct to that initiative.

According to David Dorsett, the Navy’s deputy CIO, the Navy has placed a moratorium on buying server hardware or other data center infrastructure. Among the Navy’s own consolidation goals:

• Reduce the number of Navy data centers by 25%
• Increase Server utilization by at least 40%
• Boost server virtualization by at least 50%

In parallel the Navy also announced a pilot project to identify efficiencies gained by cutting data centers. As part of this directive it is conducting a business case analysis for consolidation that will help the Navy finalize its consolidation strategy by March.

The goal of the datacenter consolidation is to cut the number of federal data centers by 40% by 2015. An interesting factoid that surfaced as part of this announcement is that when combined, military branches own more than a third of the federal government’s 2,094 data centers. According to third-party sources the consolidation plan, once fully in place, could save the government $14.6 billion over the next five years.

Still, next to that $14 trillion deficit―well, at least it’s a start.