Feds To Cut Greenhouse Gases Through The Cloud
Government investments in cloud computing will contribute to the creation of a clean energy economy, the federal chief information officer said during Earth Week, Nextgov.com reported.
Agency CIOs are taking a cue from an October executive order that committed the government to lead by example in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, partly through energy-saving information technology. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra said on Wednesday that by consolidating data centers, working from home and sharing IT resources on an online-subscription basis -- or cloud computing -- agencies will become more environmentally responsible.
He likened the shift to Web-based computing to the emergence of the electrical grid and centralized water supply. "The old model went to duplicative and wasteful spending, when you had to have your own well and your own electrical generation capability. You had all this fragmentation that didn't lead to better resource utilization," Kundra said. "We want to shift to an environment where we can use computer power on demand."
If agencies don't start conserving computing power, the energy output from the federal government is expected to spike, he said. In 2006, computer servers exhausted more than 6 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, and that number is expected to double to 12 billion by 2011, unless the government adopts green IT practices.
In February, Kundra sent a memo to agency CIOs on data center consolidation that noted the number of federal data centers grew from 432 in 1998 to more than 1,100 in 2009. Agencies are using only about 6 percent of their infrastructure, he said on Wednesday, and certain agencies are seeing a sharp rise in server demand on a seasonal basis. The Internal Revenue Service, for example, strains its infrastructure around the April 15 tax filing deadline. His memo directed agencies to develop data center consolidation plans that identify opportunities for cloud computing by June 30. The plans will be incorporated into fiscal 2012 budgets by Aug. 30. To read more, click here.
Join the Discussion
The National Journal Group has the right (but not the obligation) to monitor the comments and to remove any materials it deems inappropriate.
Comments powered by Disqus