The Bush administration believes it can cut the US government's
annual IT infrastructure costs, proposed at US$22.4 billion for
fiscal 2007, by 16 percent to 27 percent through increased
consolidation, standardization and interoperability.
Karen Evans, who heads the White House's IT office at the Office
of Management and Budget, said in an e-mail that "potential
government-wide cost savings are between $3.7 billion and $6.0
billion per year if the Federal Government operates as one
enterprise similar to private industry corporations."
IT vendors and federal agencies were due to confidentially
submit ideas on how to accomplish that goal by last Friday, and by
next month, the White House wants to have a framework in place for
guiding the proposed changes. A final plan is expected to be ready
by year's end, according to the White House, which set the
cost-reduction goal in March.
The government's overall priorities include reducing total cost
of ownership, promoting a modular approach to system design and
ensuring that installations of proprietary technology don't affect
interoperability.
Seeking a Standard
The White House isn't necessarily moving toward a purge of
legacy systems. But Tom Berti, data center manager at the U.S.
Census Bureau, said last week that he thinks he can move as much as
80 percent of his IT environment to blade servers running a
combination of Linux and Windows over the next three or four
years.
Berti manages about 50,000 square feet of raised-floor data
center space, with more than 1,000 pieces of hardware running a
laundry list of operating systems, such as Tru64, OpenVMS, HP-UX,
AIX, Solaris, Linux, Windows and others. But now the Census Bureau
is starting to shift applications to blades from IBM and Marlboro,
Mass.-based Egenera Inc.
"More than anything, I would like to have a standard
configuration," Berti said. "How can you have a [workable] patch
management strategy if all the operating systems are different?"
He
declined to forecast the cost savings that the Census Bureau
could see as a result of the planned shift. But, Berti said, "there
are a lot of economies to [having] two manufacturers and two
operating systems -- that's what it comes down to."
For example, maintenance and training costs should be reduced,
he said. He also expects to save money by centralizing systems
management and buying his operating system software in bulk. In
addition, the agency is adopting more of a utility computing
approach that should simplify and speed the provisioning of system
resources, according to Berti.
There will be some exceptions to the blade server switch-over,
such as the continued use of larger servers for applications that
require symmetrical multiprocessing capabilities. Berti has
installed about 170 blades thus far and has just begun putting them
into production use after an initial testing phase. The blade
servers shouldn't cause power or cooling problems in his data
center, which is a relatively new facility, Berti said.
Ray Bjorklund, an analyst at Federal Sources Inc. in McLean,
Va., said that some defense agencies have been aggressive about
pursuing IT consolidation and modernization initiatives. But that
isn't the case at most federal agencies, he added.
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