Contractors will find insight into the trends and technologies related to helping agencies meet the directives of the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI) with INPUT's new report, Assessment of the 2010 Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative. This report examines agency data center inventories, and contains summaries of select departments' initiatives, applicable technologies, best practices, and their potential impact on IT spending. It also includes information on which agencies to target for consolidation services and solutions and projected timelines for implementation.

FDCCI aims to address the increase of federal data centers' infrastructure expenses, which comprise an average of 30 percent of government-wide IT spending and also pose a significant impact on energy consumption. The initiative intends to reduce these trends by promoting the use of green IT and reducing hardware and operations costs. It also emphasizes the need for overall information security, efficient computing solutions, and allocating cost savings to support mission-critical areas.

Key findings from Assessment of the 2010 Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative include the following:

• Agencies will focus on consolidating small centers/server rooms and optimizing larger data centers
• Virtualization will be the key technology solution, including the utilization of cloud computing
• Lack of upfront funding presents a major barrier to consolidation

Contractors' experience in applying private sector best practices to government needs could alleviate agencies' concerns; however, the report raises concerns about the timelines for implementation. "This will likely become a decade-long process, although we expect some quick wins with agencies expanding their use of virtualization," said Angie Petty, principal analyst at INPUT. "But changes that produce a large-scale reduction in an agency's real estate footprint and other physical structure changes will take a lot of money and time. This initiative propels the government in the right direction, but not at a revolutionary pace."

The report also provides a detailed overview of federal government data center inventories, including central processing unit utilization, power usage effectiveness ratios, and INPUT projections on the financial impact of consolidation on federal IT budgets over the next five years. The data is delivered in Word format, and includes an executive briefing on PowerPoint, and an Excel workbook with data on the landscape and financial impact segments.