Today my eye caught Shutting Down Duplicative Data Centers on AOL Gov:

Today, as part of the President’s Campaign to Cut Waste, we are announcing that in 2012, we will shut down 178 data centers, bringing us to a total of 373 data centers that will be shut down by the end of 2012. We are closing 195 data centers in this calendar year, of which 81 have already been shut down. This represents substantial progress towards our goal of shutting down more than 800 data centers by 2015, a move that is expected to save taxpayers more than $3 billion. The author is Jeffrey Zients, Federal Chief Performance Officer and OMB’s Deputy Director for Management. This article originally appeared on the White House website http://CIO.gov.

Because I had written an earlier story on AOL Gov entitled Federal Data Center Map: Why are over half the data centers missing? and I decided to see if the data set was better and the facts were correct using Spotfire again because Socrata at Data.gov does not support faceted search:

Fact Check: 373 data centers in the data set – Yes. Closed by end of 2012: To be closed between 1/1/2012 and 12/31/2012 – 178 – Yes; Closed between Initiative Kickoff 2/26/2010 and Report 7/19/2011 – 81 – Yes; and To be closed between 7/19/2011 and 12/31/2011 -114 – Yes, for a Total of 195 – Yes!

Statistics: Departments (18), Data Center Names (373), Street Addresses (33), City and State (155), Latitude (147), and Longitude (147), and Status (373). Data Source: Excel

I still had to cleanup some of the data in the newer data set and found over half the locations were still missing. In addition the recent article mentions the goals of shutting down 373 data centers by the end of 2012 and more than 800 data centers by the end of 2015. So where’s the data? And it would be nice to see a column of data for the cost saving by data center so citizens can see the individual closures and savings in their own locations.

Larry Allen
GSA Administrator Martha Johnson announced July 20th that her agency’s IT Multiple Award Schedule will offer only products that comply with either ENERGY STAR or the government’s own Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT). It will be interesting to watch whether the greater impact of this move falls upon GSA or its contractors.

Johnson’s announcement came as no surprise to anyone who has heard her speak over the past two years. Dozens of companies, in fact, have already moved toward offering ENERGY STAR-only IT products or similar “green” solutions. While GSA will have to use some common sense in circumstances where there is no identifiable “green” benchmark, I am not sure that Johnson’s announcement will cause a tidal wave of anxiety from contractors. Keep reading →