"It’s all about the data" is a popular expression today. More and more, we’ve come to realize that data is the central building block for protecting, processing, sharing and storing information. And, as government and industry data owners learn to believe in these realities, they quite often decide to establish their own data centers to maintain control. On the surface, this might easily seem like the right thing to do, but it isn’t always the best course to achieve effective consolidation. Being aware of data center consolidation experience and realities can save organizations large sums of money and improve operations.

I first began watching the patterns in data center consolidation in the early 1990s, when individual organizations within the U.S. Defense Department had built 194 mainframe data centers. However, through Defense Management Report Decisions, these numerous data centers were transferred into the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) for management attention. Over the past 18 years, the data center transformation achieved by DISA professionals has been nothing short of remarkable. Their actions are something that we can all continue to learn from today, both in government and in industry.

In 1990, after inheriting the Defense Department data centers, DISA found itself managing 194 centers being run by more than 9,600 government workers with mainframe workload of 4,645 millions of instructions per second (MIPS) at an operating cost of more than $1 billion per year. By 1995, DISA continued to leverage advancements in technology, and it adopted commercial best practices to achieve a substantial increase in efficiency along with significant cost reductions, which saved hundreds of millions of dollars per year. These advancements were achieved by consolidating the mainframe workload in all 194 locations into 16 larger data centers, which in 2002 were further consolidated into five data centers and one legacy processing site.

Overall, these actions achieved a 76 percent reduction in government workers and a 75 percent reduction in computing costs while accomplishing more than 60 percent more work. Between 1990 and 2002, the efforts of DISA and others to consolidate and optimize mainframe processing reduced the Defense Department’s annual operating budget from more than $1 billion to $263 million — a 75 percent decrease.

Read the rest of the article at SIGNAL Magazine. 

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