The data centre strategy will drive through a significant rationalisation of the data centres that provide information based services to public sector organisations. This will bring substantial savings in cost and energy consumption, and at the same time improve service standards and the ability to cope with disruption. The data centre strategy is aligned with other elements of the Government ICT strategy in particular the PSN, and provides the enabling platform for the G-Cloud and the G-AS.
Recent development of the data centre infrastructure in the public sector has followed a similar pattern to that in most large organisations. Budgets and procurement decisions have been devolved to many hundreds of organisations. While procurement decisions have been progressed in the best interests of each individual organisation, at the ‘big picture’ level this has resulted in an increasingly costly proliferation of data centres that now makes it difficult to:
- Achieve large, cross government economies of scale
- Meet environmental and sustainability targets
- Protect against natural disasters or human initiated incidents
- Provide consistent security controls cross government
- Deliver ICT systems that are flexible and responsive to demand in order to support transformational government
- Take advantage of new technologies in order to deliver faster business benefits
- Procure in a way that supports and encourages a dynamic and responsive supplier marketplace
In late 2008, members of the CIO Council and the Intellect Public Sector Council initiated joint work that concluded the opportunity now exists to progress a data centre strategy for the whole of the public sector. The intention is to consolidate public sector data centres (whether in house or outsourced), firstly in central government (including NDPBs and Executive Agencies), and then moving into the wider public sector.
The data centre strategy will be delivered in a way that enables and leverages the new approaches pioneered by the large Internet firms for data centre design, thus enabling the G cloud “infrastructure as a service model” that will substantially drive up the efficiency of asset utilisation.
Our vision for data centres is that over the next three years, 10-12 highly resilient strategic data centres for the public sector are implemented to common standards.
Establishing these strategic data centres will enable consolidation of existing public data centres into highly secure and resilient facilities – provided by a managed number of suppliers delivering best practice. The benefits will include savings on ICT infrastructure costs in the order of £300m per annum and a significant contribution to environmental targets through a reduction of up to 75% in power and cooling requirements. These benefits will be achieved in parallel with improved service standards – the new ICT infrastructure will be more resilient, will have significantly reduced reliability, and significantly greater and more consistent ability to recover from major incidents.
The data centre strategy will be implemented in a way that delivers benefit at the earliest opportunity. Consideration will be given to the early introduction of a data centre space brokerage service to reduce the need for new data centre space to be procured by public sector bodies – unused space exists in a number of existing facilities which will be re-used where possible. Public servants will be able to store their data in the knowledge that it is secure, accessible and sustainable.
“Public servants will be able to store their data in the knowledge that it is secure, accessible and sustainable.”???
They omitted “vibrant” and “diverse”.
What precisely is this page saying? Condensing it down and cutting out the platitudes, it seems to say that they are centralising ALL public sector data storage under one organisation.
Is it me or has someone managed to shoehorn in enviromental policy buzzwords into a page about data storage and collection?
It’s well known that if you put 10 computers in one room they use less power than if they were in 10 different rooms. Oh, no, hang on, that’s drivel.
One thing they did get right though “…the new ICT infrastructure will be more resilient, will have significantly reduced reliability, …”. Significantly reduced reliability sounds about right.
Mitsubishi VS Cisco
Well, it’s regrettable you’re using too much power and spending too much money (despite being the envy of the world etc). Please get your act together asap. We pay too much tax, and there’s only one planet.
However, this does sound like an Intellect scheme to consolidate IT spend with a narrower base of suppliers. I’d want to see really careful evaluation of the alternatives.
Also – this idea of forcing the entire public sector to use Whitehall data centres makes me uneasy. Why would Whitehall data centres be better than – say – Amazon data centres or data centres operated by cloud service providers who are good at what they do?
Rationalisation of the numerous public sector datacenters will provide substantial cost savings, providing the resources of the datacenter are commodity based systems, where different departments or government bodies rent time/space on a common platform based in strategically placed datacenters. So often we see local authorities purchasing additional SAN’s and servers to see a different department has significant over capacity, through to the worst cases of excess where the NHS (NPFiT) Program has mandated that NHS trusts purchase new servers and SAN’s from a mandated provider when they already have systems with spare capacity that is more than capable of running the new applications.
Now if we take all the spare capacity that is sitting in local datacenters from all the different local authorities, regional authorities, NHS trusts and Government departments that is a significant amount of servers and storage utilizing power, cooling and generating heat and adding to our overall emissions output which could quite easily be utilized by other departments. So yes there will be environmental savings by rationalizing over capacity.
But these cost savings can only be realized when common sense prevails and the government CIO mandates common platforms and common architectures between government departments and adherence to standards based computing models. With regional datacenters providing commodity based server, storage and networking platforms.
“…the new ICT infrastructure will be more resilient, will have significantly reduced reliability,”
…No truer words were ever spoken