DOD lone holdout on data center closure reporting

The Defense Department is the lone holdout of the 24 Federal CIO Council agencies that were required to report data center consolidation progress last month, but its report will be coming soon after being hamstrung by DOD’s massive inventory, according to a department spokesperson.

“Amongst all federal agencies we face the most significant challenges due to the size of our data center inventory and the number of organizations we have to coordinate with,” said Air Force Lt. Col. April Cunningham, DOD spokesperson. “We are following the DOD prescribed process for public release for information, and we intend to release the plan once it gets through this process. We anticipate that this will happen in the very near future.”

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Reports on data center consolidation progress were due to the Office of Management and Budget by Oct. 7. On that day, a post on the DOD CIO website said that a draft was in progress and would be released in 30 days pending “internal DOD review.” That draft has yet to publicly surface, meaning DOD missed the OMB date and then its own extended deadline. No exact date for the public release of DOD's progress report has been made available.

Nonetheless, Cunningham said that DOD has exceeded its fiscal 2011 goals for data center closures.

DOD’s current overall goal is to reduce number of data centers to from 772 in fiscal 2010 to 428 by fiscal 2015. The fiscal 2011 goal was to close 52 data centers; DOD exceeded that goal by closing 57 data centers, according to Cunningham.

DOD's targets for the next four years: 

Fiscal 2012 goal: close 61 data centers

Fiscal 2013 goal: close 127 data centers

Fiscal 2014 and 2015 goals: close 52 data centers each year