Recently, I stumbled upon the current DCOI optimization dashboard — which is an overall look at how data centers in federal agencies are performing across different categories. If you’re not familiar with the DCOI yet, here’s some background: DCOI is short for the Data Center Optimization Initiative. It’s a federal initiative that falls under the umbrella of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB): the OMB has set forth requirements for data centers as a part of the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA).
The initiative has several purposes: to cut unnecessary government IT spending, increase security, reduce the geographical footprints of government data centers, stop IT bloat, and boost efficiency.
Two key elements? The DCOI mandate requires federal data centers to implement DCIM by 2018 — and to lower the PUE rate to 1.5 or better. One goal is to reduce errors caused by manual data entry — through the automation of monitoring and reporting. With accurate, timely information, agencies can better act on it. With DCIM in place, and with the PUE goal, the DCOI aims to ensure federal government servers are actually being utilized (not just drawing power but performing work).
So…what’s my point? Governments, as our national deficit clearly highlights, aren’t made of money — and finding the most cost effective solution is always a chief concern. If you are interested in seeing how DCIM and/or power monitoring can save your organization money, there’s no better place to look than at this DCOI optimization dashboard. A quick look at how federal data centers are performing under the DCOI initiative illustrates the intrinsic value of DCIM and monitoring tools.
With the right software in place, federal agencies are meeting the requirements for data centers. The dashboard shows that, in the long run, automation does deliver on its promises of server utilization, energy usage, power usage effectiveness, facility utilization, and virtualization. USAID has a goal of 65% server utilization by 2018: as of the publication of this dashboard, it’s already achieved 49.4%.
The bottom line? In these charts, you can clearly see that government agencies are on their way to achieving the optimization requirements set forth by the DCOI. If they can do it with such large budgets, you can absolutely do it with yours. So…get yourself some automation and start putting servers to use, put your facilities to work, and lower that PUE (and all the associated costs).
* The U.S. Army has awarded netTerrain with the Certificate of Networthiness (CoN). For more information, click here.