Obama Orders Agencies to Speed Up Data Center Consolidation

President Barack Obama ordered feaderal agency leaders on Thursday to accelerate the selling or consolidating of underused real estate, with particular focus on data centers, according to a report by Data Center Knowledge.

Obama addressed this concern in a memo:

"Both taxpayer dollars and energy resources are being wasted to maintain these excess assets. In addition, many of the properties necessary for the Government's work are not operated efficiently, resulting in wasted funds and excessive greenhouse gas pollution.

"For example, over the past decade, the private sector reduced its data center footprint by capitalizing on innovative technologies to increase efficiencies. However, during that same period, the Federal Government experienced a substantial increase in the number of data centers, leading to increased energy consumption, real property expenditures, and operations and maintenance costs."

The order comes three months after Federal CIO Vivek Kundra launched the largest data center consolidation in history, which set to reduce more than 1,100 data centers.

Kundra said in April that the one of the main goals of the data center consolidation plan is to find projects that can operate in the cloud "instead of just webifying our brick and mortar institutions."

Kundra ordered agencies to record an inventory of their IT assets by April 30 and establish an initial consolidation plan by June 30.

The plans would then be finalized by December 31 to begin implementaion in 2011.

Obama said he anticipates the consolidation plan to "produce no less than $3 billion in cost savings by the end of fiscal year 2012."