Page 40 - GCN, May 2017

DATA CENTERS
BY THE NUMBERS
9–12%
the usage capacity of the average government server
65%
the government’s goal for average server utilization
$577m amount the Treasury Department saved from 2011 to 2013 by consolidating data centers
50%
amount of data centers closed by the General Services Administration and the departments of Agriculture, Treasury and Justice
700
facilities closed by the Defense Department
10
racks used by DOD after adopting a Nutanix solution, down from 60
crawl-walk phase of cloud computing,” McClure said.
Progress is being made, however, and Dave Powner, director of IT man- agement issues at the Government Ac- countability Office and a longtime pro- ponent of cloud computing, said, “It is really contingent on how well agencies can optimize what they have.”
In his view, though, optimization has been fairly limited. An Office of Man- agement and Budget memo states that the average government server is used at only 9 percent to 12 percent of its capacity.
“That was really the impetus to start this data center consolidation effort,” Powner said. “The goal is to get that number up to 65 percent.”
A 2014 GAO report estimates that consolidating data centers helped the Treasury Department avoid more than $577 million in costs from 2011 to 2013. Other agencies have seen tens of millions in savings, the report states.
Some agencies have made big strides, Powner said. The General Ser- vices Administration, NASA and the de- partments of Agriculture, Treasury and Justice have closed 50 percent of their data centers. The Defense Department has not yet hit 50 percent, but it has closed 700 facilities, he added.
“I think there is more of an accep- tance that you can meet some of the security requirements through cloud offerings,” he said, and he attributes that shift to the examples set by early adopters, which have allowed others to see implementations that work.
Yet although cloud technology prom- ises cost savings and flexibility, most experts do not envision a government without data centers.
“I don’t necessarily see everything moving to cloud,” said Sophia Vargas, an infrastructure analyst at Forrester Research. “I think it’s kind of stuck — potentially for a long time — in more of a hybrid multistate.”
There seems to be general agreement
that at least for the foreseeable future, hybrid solutions will define federal data centers. And the inner workings of those centers are changing accordingly.
HOW HYBRID HELPS
Richard Fichera, a vice president and principal infrastructure analyst at For- rester, said the simple definition of a hybrid data center is exactly what it sounds like: It uses enterprise and cloud solutions. For example, a local data center with one or more cloud ser- vices can provide a best-of-both-worlds scenario that reduces costs and leads to the level of consolidation that Powner seeks.
“People are starting to find bal- ance,” Chehreh said. “There is nothing but a bright future for hybrid moving forward.”
Gary Danoff, senior vice president of cloud solutions at DLT Solutions, said hybrid data centers help agencies move to the cloud in baby steps, starting with applications that are easy to transfer to a cloud environment.
Websites, for example, are ideal for the cloud because they are “more transient and dynamic in nature,” Var- gas said. “Anything that needs to sup- port dynamic workloads” is a good fit, too.
Most agencies are keeping more sensitive applications on premises for now, in part because the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Pro- gram, which sets standards for cloud security, has only begun to authorize cloud services at higher security base- lines. But some experts say the desire to stay on premises for security reasons is nothing more than a peace-of-mind consideration.
Heiter said that if two data centers — one on-premises and one in the cloud — are using the same hardware and security procedures, it would be hard to notice a difference. “In the end, it comes down to trust,” he said. If an IT manager wants to be able to walk down
36 GCN MAY 2017 • GCN.COM