Page 8 - Federal Computer Week, May/June 2019

Trending
DOJ web traffic
surges with
Mueller report
Interest in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election translated into a massive spike in traffic to the Justice.gov website. But the Justice Department’s Office of the CIO scaled up services to successfully manage the loads.
When FCW asked about IT contingency planning ahead of the report’s release in April, CIO Joe Klimavicz said his team “worked diligently with our web service industry partners” and procured 50,000 gigabytes of additional hosting bandwidth.
That advance preparation proved invaluable because visits to Justice. gov surged more than 7,000 percent on April 18. The site receives 8 million visits on an average day, Klimavicz said, but by 5 p.m. on the day the redacted report was released to the public, there had already been more than 587 million visits — 247 million of which came within the first hour of the report’s release.
The website experienced no IT performance or availability issues during that time, Klimavicz said, adding that DOJ also “increased our web server capacity to allow for faster download speeds and ensure continued accessibility of the 142M report throughout the day.”
— Troy K. Schneider and Chase Gunter
$4.5B
in federal IT purchases were made through NASA’s SEWP last year
GAO: Agencies could push harder on data center closings
Federal agencies have closed thousands of inefficient, costly and unneeded data centers since a governmentwide initiative began, but the Government Accountability Office says there are still many missed opportunities for savings.
Since the Office of Management and Budget launched a push to close or combine data centers, federal agencies have shut down 6,250 of them. That’s a little more than half of the 12,000 data centers reported to OMB.
However, a recent GAO report states that 4,700 data centers are not designated for closure, and another 1,200 that agencies had planned to close are still open.
The report covers implementation of the Data Center Optimization Initiative through fiscal 2018.
Of the 24 agencies participating in DCOI, only 13 had met or planned to meet all of OMB’s closure goals, and 11 said they did not have plans to meet the goals.
Additionally, as of last August, 16 agencies had met or planned to meet closure cost-savings goals that would total more than $2 billion for fiscal 2016 through 2018.
The report notes that some agencies that have successfully consolidated
data centers have strong cloud and shared-services programs. Specifically, top IT managers at the Commerce Department, the General Services Administration and the Social Security Administration emphasized the importance of moving data center assets and systems to the cloud to optimize operations and reduce costs.
As a result of GSA’s emphasis on cloud and shared services, the agency had closed 118 data centers as of last August, GAO said.
Despite the successes, some agencies still lag, according to the report. Five agencies missed their goals for cost savings and avoidance from fiscal 2016 to 2018, resulting in a $2.7 billion shortfall. In addition, three agencies did not have cost-saving targets and did not report any savings during that period.
In its report, GAO made 36 recom- mendations primarily related to meet- ing OMB’s closure and savings targets.
OMB recognized that agencies have been successful in going after the “low- hanging fruit,” but they needed some budget controls to push them toward the cloud, shared services and third- party co-location for application and data hosting.
— Mark Rockwell
Jeff Lewelling
@jeff_lewelling
Consider this RedHat resource in context of @KelmanSteve’s examples cited here: https://t.co/wPsTPbjFNr. Could this advanced technology allow for a less bureaucratic process and more productive (i.e faster, potential for more voluminous testing etc.) learning organizations?
8:44 AM - 25 Apr 2019
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