By Michael O’Connell
Web Editor
Federal News Radio

The Defense Department predicts it will save $3 billion over the next five years by consolidating data centers. The Federal Times reports that amount doesn’t include the upfront costs needed to close some centers and move out the equipment.

Some of the savings will come from reduced energy needs, and some from construction that won’t materialize. It also takes fewer people to operate fewer facilities. DoD counted 772 data centers in 2010, and has closed 55 of them in the meantime.

In a report released Nov. 8, the Department of Defense detailed its plan to optimize department computing centers and set up Core centers to support critical enterprise services.

According to the report, DoD and its Combatant Commands/Services/Agencies (CC/S/As) have reviewed all options for achieving consolidations, including mitigating the infrastructure to enterprise computing centers (DECCs) at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and considering possible commercial options as a way to cut costs for IT services. For example, the Air Force, Army and the Defense Logistics Agencies (DLA) have gotten behind a “DISA First” data center consolidation strategy. This means that before trying other solutions they will consider DISA for data and application hosting first.

DoD estimated that by FY2015 it could achieve approximate annual savings of $58 million in energy costs, $511 million in total data center building operational costs, and $111 million in expansion and construction costs. DoD Components and the DoD Comptroller have not verified these estimated figures yet.

This story is part of Federal News Radio’s daily DoD Report. For more defense news, click here.

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