One of the Navy’s biggest pushes this year will be finding ways to reduce business IT costs by 25 percent while maintaining current operational and security levels. One of the big parts of that will be data center consolidation, an initiative that could save the department $1.4 billion in net savings by Fiscal Year 2017.
“We must begin realizing savings in fiscal year 2013. Reducing the IT budget by 25 percent won’t be easy. We must act more like an enterprise to become more effective and efficient, which ultimately enables us to better support the Sailors and Marines around the world to achieve our mission,” wrote Navy Chief Information Officer Terry Halvorsen on the Navy CIO blog. “One of the things we will do in the department is to look at what are the best operating data centers in terms of mission sustainment, cost of operations and security, and those are the data centers that we will move stuff into.”
Currently, there are approximately 150 DON data centers in operation that have not been optimized for network structure and costs that include purchasing, manpower support, testing, certification and operation and maintenance expenses.
To guide this effort, the Navy established a Navy Data Center Consolidation Task Force to assess the current state and close as many data centers as feasible.
The Marine Corps is evaluating local computing centers and isolated server hosting facilities for opportunities to consolidate with plans to complete regionalization of IT infrastructure assets into its four enterprise and seven regional data centers.
The Marine Corps Enterprise IT Services Center in Kansas City, Mo., has opened and will be the centerpiece of the Marine Corps data center consolidation strategy. “SPAWAR engineers have done this sort of work before. In the last five years we’ve transitioned a number of applications out of existing data centers and into SPAWAR hosting facilities,” said RADM Pat Brady, SPAWAR Commander. “In work for the Commander of the Navy Reserve Force, we realized over $31 million of life cycle savings, and a savings to the Reserve force of over $6 million that would have been spent on contractor services and license fees.”
