Gizmodo: US Government Shutting Down 40% of Its Data Centers

From our friend Roger Bishop at WTHR:

Kwame Opam —US Government Shutting Down 40% of Its Data CentersContinuing with their spring (summer?) cleaning, the government has elected to shut down 800 of their vast collection of 2,000 data centers across the country over the next four years. Officials expect the pruning to save us billions.

Currently, the US spends $80 billion on information technology to run its numerous services and websites, making it the biggest buyer of IT in the world. But, in a bid to make the computing more efficient, many of these services will be consolidating and moving into the cloud. Sharing the computing load by performing tasks remotely and in tandem saves both processing power and money, saving $5 billion a year. And closing down the data centers, apart from it being better on the environment, will save $3 billion a year in energy costs.

And we’re already ahead of schedule, on track to close down 373 center by 2012.

More of the Gizmodo article from Kwame Opam

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.