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• FedCloud Targets $20B in Evil Data Centers

  September 16th, 2009 : Rich Miller

  Data centers wore the black hat yesterday as U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra announced the launch of the federal government’s cloud compouting store at Apps.gov. The federal government spent $76 billion on IT last year, and about $20 billion of that was spent on data center infrastrucutre, Kundra said. “A lot of these investments are duplicative,” said Kundra. “We’re building data centers the size of city blocks and spending hundreds of millions of dollars. … We cannot continue on this trajectory.” The solution: begin shifting government infrastructure to cloud computing services hosted in third-party data centers, rather than building more government facilities. Kundra notes that the General Services Administration has eight data centers, while Homeland Security has 23 (but not for long, as they’re consolidating to two large facilities).

  Here’s a video of Kundra’s announcement Tuesday at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. An interesting moment: check out the video that starts at the 19 minute mark, which underscores the “data centers are the enemy” theme. It’s almost like a bad political ad: when the data centers appear, the music turns ominous and the background grows dark … but when cloud computing is mentioned, the music turns happy and the landscape becomes green.

  The presentation runs about 30 minutes. Kundra begins speaking at about the 4:15 mark.

  Check out our Cloud Computing Channel for more on the government cloud initiative. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.
  

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DataCenterNerd

Posted September 16th, 2009

Vivek Kundra has no idea what he is talking about. He has NO EXPERIENCE in Datacenters or any real world technology implementation. In a recent interview he is quoted as using COBOL as a web 2.0 language. I’m sorry to be so harsh, but I have absolutely no confidence in him.

Chuck Smith

Posted September 16th, 2009

I would agree that his experience in the field is “limited” but he does have a point: the Federal government does have a problem, no different than a very large enterprise, of sprawl. Thier technology and mission of thier IT and systems grew beyond anyones expectations. They need to “shrink”, consolidate whatever. But not only for cost savings, but also to leverage the efficiencies of new technologies.

zen kishimoto

Posted September 18th, 2009

Rich, totally agree with you as I said in my post.

Zen Kishimoto

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