Green Information Technology Strategic Plan - Departmental ...

Other Benefits
The 4 EDCs chosen are designed to provide the correct
operating environment for Federal Government systems.
EDCs responsibility includes physical system security,
operations management, cyber security, scan and patch of
operating systems, and continuity of operations. In addition,
USDA will be moving the planning and development of
hardware architecture for systems to the OCIO, under
the executive responsible for the Enterprise Data Centers.
In a study conducted by OCIO, the hardware architecture
for approximately 250 network application servers was
reviewed. For these servers, better hardware architecture
would improve system performance and result in a savings of
approximately $10 million (payroll, hardware, application,
and energy expense).
—Increased Security
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The Midwest EDC received a Tier 3 Telecommunications Industry Association Standards
for Data Centers rating, which translates to a 99.741% availability rate.
Data center security is an immense threat due to the USDA
data centers having various security policies and requirements.
Without a central body working toward consolidation, there
is no oversight which guarantees that all data centers are fully
secure from all threats. Data centers house privacy, sensitive,
and personal identifiable information. The USDA can illafford
to have security falter on any front. Consolidation
will increase security due to all EDCs operating under a
unified security policy. These efforts ensure that all missioncritical
systems will be protected on an ongoing basis.
—Limit the Impact of Rising Energy Prices
Consolidation will limit the impact of rising energy prices on
operational budgets. Most large enterprise IT organizations
spend approximately 5% of their total IT budgets on energy.
Gartner research suggests that this number will rise by two to
three times within 5 years. Not only because of the increasing
energy consumption of data centers, but also because of the
steady rise of KWh charges. With less hardware, there will
be less energy needed to power equipment and less energy
consumed for cooling the data center. This not only helps
to curb the USDA appetite for power, but also protects the
organization from rising commodity prices. Moving data
center and net closet equipment to areas that charge less for
electricity also protects USDA from the rise in energy prices.
The incremental increases in utility costs are even more
protected from approaching the National average.
—Ease of Maintenance
Once data centers have the virtualization technology in
place, the ease of maintenance for replacing servers becomes
evident. If a server in the server pool goes down, all that
is needed is for a technician to pull the bad server out and
replace it with a new one. Since the new server is hooked in
to a pool, it will then receive its tasks from the data manager
for processing jobs and begin working. There is no longer a
need for configuration and coding.
—Less Application Downtime
Data center consolidation to EDCs will provide for less
application downtime in two ways: 1.) The EDC locations
have a higher availability rate than the decentralized Agency
data centers, as determined by the Telecommunications
Industry Association (TIA) Standards for Data Centers
(TIA-942), and 2.) Virtualization enables less application
downtime by directing workload to other servers.
The Midwest EDC received a Tier 3 TIA-942 rating
which translates to a 99.741% availability rate. EDCs are
designed and constructed to meet these types of stringent
requirements that other data centers are unable to meet.
By simply moving all applications into EDCs, application
availability USDA-wide makes an immediate jump up.
Virtualization software further decreases application
downtime by directing workload to a pool of available
servers. If a server goes down, the software will send all
processing instructions to the other servers in the pool, thus
reducing any down-time for mission-critical applications.
Green Information Technology Strategic Plan