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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."
This being an IT project, I predict it will take 5 years longer than planned, cost 10x the initial budget, and still never really work quite right.
Fixed that for you.
Oh, Vivek, what brilliant thing will you think of next? How much energy will it take to replace all of these server farms? How much energy will be required for the taxpayers to earn the money necessary to pay for it? What about security concerns of consolidating all of this data?
I think Vivek wants to make himself look useful after being exposed as a fraud by John C. Dvorak. http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2009/08/12/special-report-is-us-chief-information-officer-cio-vivek-kundra-a-phony/
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)...
Didn't read the article, but my experience with government entities is that they receive a specific value of funding each year to spend on gear, training, energy costs, etc.
The nature of the funding goes that if you don't use all of it this year, you get a reduced amount next year. Now this may seem logical -- it may seem like a policy that governs spending. Instead what it is is a policy that drives UNNECESSARY SPENDING.
The places I have been were frugal but appropriate in their spending throughout the year. As the funding for the year would approach a close (in October), all-of-a-sudden the leadership would start spending money like crazy because they had a large surplus. Money would be spent on things that were not actually necessary; if they were necessary, why not get them at any other time during the year?
In several cases, seeing this strange frenzy of spending I would ask the leadership what was going on. They explained the 'use it or lose it' policy and that in order to maintain the funding they got this year, for next year, they *must* spend it all. I was in conflict because I was taught integrity/honesty and there is no integrity in spending up dads helpful money on worthless junk so as to appear that you still have 'need'.
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The reason I bring this up is because I am curious if the units that will save money via IT consolidation will actually save us money or if they will be (by obvious standing procedure) driven to spend it in pointless/needless ways.
Discuss? Anyone else experience this?
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.
I for one have full confidence in the government that after reorganizing their data centers, they will have a lean, optimized, efficient operation. Who's with me?
Currently hooked on AMP
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!