Green Information Technology Strategic Plan - Departmental ...

64
Consolidation of all USDA applications and hardware infrastructure to EDCs will
directly impact most of the Secretary’s Green program areas.
outsource information processing requirements to other
Federal or commercial data centers if the aggregate installed
base is below minimum target sizes 39 .
Many of the USDA locations that house application, server,
storage, and related network infrastructure were not built
to handle the requirements of such highly sophisticated IT
equipment. Not only are these locations highly inefficient
in electricity consumption for powering and cooling IT
equipment, but they are also not properly equipped to
handle the ongoing increase in needed wattage to power the
IT equipment. As the amount of data being communicated
across computing devices grows, USDA has been filling
data center racks with increasingly powerful servers to keep
pace. In Washington DC, the data centers and network
closets that house such equipment are in buildings that were
constructed circa 1930. It would take major structural,
electrical, and network renovations to even approach
current data center efficiency standards. Continuing to keep
information technology and communication equipment
scattered in these historic buildings not only keeps USDA’s
power consumption needlessly high, but also inflates USDA’s
business risk as energy shortages and power outages increase.
The network communications of the United States supports
putting information technology in the most efficient data
center locations and transporting information to teleworkers
or other employee business locations.
To illustrate, Gartner research suggests that legacy data
centers typically were built to a design specification of about
35 to 70 watts per square foot. “Current design needs can
vary from between 150 to 200 watts per square foot, and
by 2011, this could rise to more than 300 watts per square
foot. These figures for energy per square foot represent just
the energy needed to power the IT equipment; they do not
include the energy needed by air-conditioning systems to
remove the heat generated by this equipment. Depending
on the tier level and future equipment density plans in the
data center, these cooling needs can increase the overall
power requirements by an additional 80% to 120%.” 40
The USDA has Enterprise Data Centers (EDC) that
were specifically designed and constructed to take into
consideration modern energy and cooling needs, operational
processes, and efficiency standards. In order to take full
advantage of USDA EDCs, all scattered server, storage, and
related IT equipment should be taken out of highly inefficient
data centers and net closets and physically consolidated to
EDCs. Consolidation of all of USDA’s applications and
hardware infrastructure to EDCs will directly impact most
of the Secretary’s Green Program Areas, as well as drive
USDA toward meeting the environmental goals set by E.O.
13423 for Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy,
and Transportation Management 41 . Moving from highly
fragmented, and often unnecessarily expensive, IT operations
to a more-consolidated organization at the enterprise level
has the potential to save a great deal of money, improve the
capability of IT, and help minimize security and business
continuity risks 42 .
Current measurement:
—Hardware and Infrastructure
Currently the USDA has 30 data centers and 120 major
network closets, consisting of an estimated 16,000 servers
(figure includes Mainframe, Wintel, Unix, and other
midrange servers). Most of these data centers and net closets
do not meet EPA standards for energy efficiency, and will
not be able to meet the goal of reducing energy intensity
by 3% annually through the end of FY2015 as set by E.O.
13423.
—Energy Consumption
Most large enterprise IT organizations spend approximately
5% of their total IT budgets on energy alone. Some estimates
go as high as 10% to 15%. Data centers account for a large
portion of this energy consumption. This is especially true
when an organization is using legacy data centers that do
not meet modern standards for data center efficiency. If a
data center is not efficient in consuming power, the energy
costs can increase at a steep rate. The Green Grid Data
Center Power Efficiency Metrics gauge a data center’s power
consumption efficiency via Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE)
ratio. Preliminary work indicates that many data centers
have a PUE of 3.0 or greater 43 . If a data center has a PUE of
3.0, it indicates that the IT equipment consumes 33% of the
power in the data center. The closer a data center gets to 1.0,
the closer the data center comes to 100% efficiency.
Green Information Technology Strategic Plan