4 steps toward smart data center consolidation
A report from IDC offers strategies for agencies working to eliminate redundant servers and migrate applications to a cloud environment.
Building design, security policies and energy consumption should all play into agencies’ datacenter decisions, an IDC Government Insights report suggests.
Government datacenters are “undergoing a once-in-a-generation shift,” a new industry report suggests, and agency leaders need to prepare for several rapidly emerging IT disrupters.
The IDC Government Insights report, titled “Technology Selection: The Government Datacenter of the Future,” explores current trends and long-term issues in a number of datacenter-related areas, including enterprise architecture, hardware and software options, and energy consumption.
Noting that spending on public cloud services is expected to increase at four times the rate of other IT infrastructure spending, the report urges agencies to:
- Understand that the real goal is consolidating applications, not necessarily full data centers.
- Learn about the Federal CIO Council’s PortfolioStat program, designed to help prioritize IT projects to make the most of tight budgets.
- Support a wide range of solutions – open source and proprietary -- and possible stack combinations.
- Offer private cloud solutions, for which the government has already shown a high preference.
IDC’s analysts also acknowledge that the Federal CIO Council is pushing toward cloud services and setting targets for system consolidation. The report urges contractors to become familiar with FedRAMP, Forge.mil, and CORE.gov, as well as monitor what NIST, NASA, GSA, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and other agencies are doing “to promote open source growth and/or any evolving preferences for specific proprietary solutions.”
“Changes are very iterative and they can take years to unfold, depending on the budgets and preferences of individual agencies,” Shawn McCarthy, Research Director of IDC Government Insights said in a statement. “But the long-term trends are highly apparent, and IT managers are advised to familiarize themselves with how datacenters are evolving.”