The Independent View: Defense Department CIO Blamed for Missing Data Center Target

The U.S. Department of Defense is falling behind on cost-saving efforts to consolidate thousands of data centers, a Federal watchdog reported.

By the end of Federal fiscal-year 2015, the department had closed 568 of 3,115, or 18%, of its data centers spread across military installations and other facilities, according to a report by the Defense Department Inspector General.

The Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative, an effort launched in 2010 to curb costs for data-center software, hardware and operations, and run more efficient IT systems, set a government-wide goal for all Federal agencies to shut down at least 40% of their data centers by 2015. Meeting that target would have saved DoD an estimated $680 million last year, the report said.

As a result of the slower pace, the agency was also unlikely to meet an internal goal of shutting 60% of its data centers by 2018, for a projected savings of $1.8 billion.

The report lay blame for the missed targets squarely on DoD CIO Terry Halvorsen’s failure to revise the department’s five-year-old data center consolidation strategy after the Office of Management and Budget expanded its designation of data centers, in March 2012, to include smaller facilities. The change instantly raised the number of data centers agency-wide to more than 1,000, from 772, an uptick that “continued to increase as DoD components discovered more data centers based on the revised definition,” the report said. It also chided Mr. Halvorsen for not providing better guidance on data center closures to agency IT managers.

That's sort of like adding an extra set of plates to someone's barbell while they are doing squats. Unfair? Who said life is fair, CIO! Suck in that gut!

It recommended that the agency revise its strategy, while including a “process for addressing changes in consolidation status.”

In his response to the findings, which was included in the report, Mr. Halvorsen said the agency was seeking to speed up the process by “integrating its approach for data center consolidation and cloud computing into a single ‘compute and storage strategy’.”

He said the agency was working with OMB officials to exclude a subset of smaller facilities, known as Special Purpose Processing Nodes, which are linked to specific infrastructure or equipment, from its total data center count.