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."

Comments

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:Better not use Northrop Grumman

[Anonymous Coward]

If Virginia's IT overhaul is any indication, this is going to be a slow-motion cluster of a mess 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: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...