EDS to Support FDA Data Center Consolidation

Electronic Data Systems (EDS) has won a key contract to support the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as it consolidates its data center network into two facilities. The FDA recently selected 10 contractors to support the project, which will invest $2.5 billion in updating the agency’s IT services and data center infrastructure over the next 10 years.

EDS was awarded a contract to oversee migrate the FDA’s existing applications to a “contractor-owned” data center, with an initial funding of $12 million. The agency’s infrastructure will be consolidated in two locations: the EDS facility and a second data center at the agency’s White Oak campus in Silver Spring, Maryland.

EDS was recently acquired by HP for $13.9 billion.

Roundup: New Data Center Projects

There have been a number of new data center unveilings this week. Here’s a roundup:

• Perimeter Technology Center opened for business today at its new 23,000 square foot data center in Oklahoma City. This is  the third new facility for the company, but the first ground-up greenfield build.
• Dartmouth College has opened a new data center in Lebanon, New Hampshire for the school’s Computer Services Department. The new facility adds 80 terabutes of storage and is designed to prevent a power outage like the one that hit the Dartmouth data center in 2004.
• Telehouse Europe has announced its third data center in France, a 15,000 square meter facility in Saint-Quentin-en Yveline.

DHS Data Center Consolidation Goes to CSC

A $390 million contract to consolidate data centers for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been awarded to Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC). The DHS is in the process of consolidating 18 data centers into two next-generation facilities. CSC will take over management of the first DHS facility, based at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, from Science Applications International Corp. See NextGov for details.

HP Consolidation Update: 28 Sites Retired

InformationWeek has an update on the data center consolidation by HP (HP), in which the company is consolidating 85 data centers worldwide into six larger centers located in three U.S. cities. CIO Randy Mott shares a status report:

The six data centers - two in Austin, two in Houston, and two in Atlanta - are operational. So far, 28 of the old data centers have been shut off and 700 applications moved into the new ones. … The number of applications now stands at 3,300, and active IT projects are actually down to less than 500. Mott says he’ll get close to the 8,000 mark for IT workers, but just as important is that the ratio of HP IT employees to contract workers will shift from approximately 50-50 in 2005 to about 90-10.

HP’s plan called for it to build two 200,000 square foot data centers in each of three markets. In Atlanta, the facilites are located in Suwanee and Alpharetta.

Server Refreshes On Tap for 2008

Computerworld’s most recent Vital Signs survey found that 32 percent of respondents said that server spending represents the single biggest increase in their IT budgets for 2008. Server consolidations, virtualization projects and the rollout of Windows Server 2008 are among the factors driving spending on new servers. Cyclical spending issues are also a factor, according to Computerworld.

“After the dot-com crash, many organizations began keeping equipment for four, five or even seven years rather than the usual three,” the article notes. “Many of those systems are now being retired.” GM, MasterCard and Bank of New York/Mellon are among the organizations that talk about their server spending plans for next year.

More on Intel’s Data Center Consolidation

Intel (INTC) is lifting the lid on some of the details of the data center consolidation it announced in April in Beijing. Intel is a year into the process, which will eventually consolidate 133 data centers worldwide into just eight high-density facilities of about 300,000 square feet apiece. About 60 percent of Intel’s existing facilities are at least 10 years old.

“We’ve started the process to End of Life (EOL) or consolidate our data centers down to just eight strategic locations,” Brently Davis, manager of Intel’s data center efficiency initiative, writes in a blog post. “This effort is planned to take us eight years, but we’re working to pull this in sooner. This initiative enables us to reduce costs, improve server and storage utilization, create higher density & more energy efficient data centers, and allows us to keep pace with our company’s rapid rate of innovation. The effort could deliver up to $750 million in Net Present Value.” Those savings will grow to between $1.4 billion and $1.8 billion over the seven-year period needed to complete the consolidation.

Intel currently has about 93,000 servers in its data centers, many of which will be replaced with a smaller footprint of new multi-core Intel Xeon processors. Virtualization will allow Intel to create higher density data centers.

Marines Plan Huge Data Center Consolidation

The United States Marine Corps (USMC) is planning a major data center consolidation that will reduce its IT infrastructure from 300 data centers worldwide down to just 30 facilities. The Marines will use software from VMware (VMW) to virtualize its operations across its data centers and mobile command units around the globe, resulting in better disaster recovery and more flexible operations.

The USMC said VMware’s Infrastructure platform provided “the robust event recovery necessary to sustain successful military operations around the world.” The Marines also intend to use VMware ACE to create “secure, virtualized desktops that can be carried on a USB thumb drive and deployed on any PC, enabling mobile combat units to access computing environments on the fly and from any location.”

“The Marines are well-positioned to tackle the challenges of 21st century military operations,” said Aileen Black, Vice President of VMware’s Federal Sales Division. “We look forward to continuing our work with the Marine Corps as it rolls out a sophisticated infrastructure virtualization strategy.”

Consolidation Drives 10 Gig Ethernet Growth

Andrew Schmitt from Nyquist Capital has posted some notes and observations from the LightReading Ethernet Conference on Oct. 15-17. This includes a summary of the keynote from Level 3 (LVLT) senior VP Jeff Tench on trends in their Gigabit Ethernet business.

Andrew shares a number of interesting data points from the presentation. Here are a few highlights:

• Level3 has 500 active 10GbE ports today.
• Customers are approaching them looking for 10GbE hookups as they consolidate data centers into a single location to reduce costs.
• (Growth of edge connections) is driving a need for very large, cheap 10GbE switches with 64 to 512 10GbE ports. This was echoed by Equinix (EQIX) two days later at the Gilder Telecosm.

When a data center consolidation reduces the number of facilities, it concentrates more bandwidth-apps in a single location. For companies consolidating a network of data centers, a consolidation also can extend the geographic distance between data centers and create lag issues (as reported by the Defense Contract Management Agency). That’s where the bigger pipes come in handy. Read more at Nyquist Capital.

Data Center Consolidation for Defense Unit

The Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) recently completed a data center consolidation that reduced its network from 18 facilities to just two. The consolidation, which is profiled at Enterprise Storage Forum (link via John Rath), used VMware and Network Appliance’s Virtual File Manager technology to simplify the data migrations as it consolidated servers at DCMA data centers in Boston and Carson, Calif.

The DCMA is the Department of Defense’s contract manager, overseeing 300,000 contracts worth $850 billion. Its consolidation gradually reduced the number of new servers purchased annually from 200 to about 20. But the process was not without challenges. The project created network latency issues, since the two remaining data centers were further apart than facilities in the larger network. With some users more than 1,200 miles apart, the latency began affecting replication and file sharing, delaying traffic and causing resends. DMCA solved the problem with WAN optimization appliances from Riverbed Technology.

State CIOs Keen on Consolidations

Data center consolidation is at the top of the to-do list for state chief information officers, according to a new survey released this week by the National Association of State CIOs (NASCIO). All but two of the 29 state CIOS said they had either completed or are planning a data center consolidation project, according to the survey, which was summarized by Government Computer News. Four have completed projects, while 11 have consolidations underway, seven are in the planning stage, and five have proposed a consolidation project but not yet moved to the planning stage.

The need to improve disaster recovery was the biggest factor driving state-level data center consolidations, according to NASCIO, being cited by 82.8% of respondents. About 65 percent identified cost savings as a major motivator, while 51.7 percent said aging facilities were prompting consolidation.