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GCN Home > 07/03/06 issue

One size fits all?

At the Census Bureau, selling groups on utility computing is key to IT consolidation

By William Jackson, GCN Staff

Scott McNealy, chairman of Sun Federal, likes to say he’s never been inside a government data center and recognized what he’s seen. He jokes that the systems running agency applications are a jumble of thrown-together parts that collectively resemble something more like Frankenstein’s monster than an efficient, consolidated server farm.

Maybe’s he’s been to the Census Bureau’s data center.

Census is largely a Unix shop, with more than 1,000 servers running its systems. The lion’s share is from Sun Microsystems Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co., but just about every manufacturer is represented, along with their associated operating systems. The heterogeneous environment grew up because each business unit was responsible for acquiring the equipment to run its applications.

Tom Berti, assistant division chief for systems management and administration at Census, is responsible for most of the Unix deployments. He says the chore of managing stovepiped resources is overwhelming.

“You can have so many variations, and that makes for a disjointed support staff,” Berti said. “These people usually specialize in one area, and when you have all these different products you don’t have the depth required to support them.” Berti and the bureau think utility computing could be the answer.

About 18 months ago, the bureau’s IT directorate mandated the Census Bureau Utility Computing Environment to simplify data center operations and increase efficiency. The plan would also shift much of the IT hardware and software budget away from separate business units within the bureau.

“The capital investment would be our responsibility,” Berti said. “That’s the point of utility computing.”

Shared pool of resources

In utility computing, IT services are delivered from a shared pool of resources rather than from dedicated hardware and software supporting each application. Among other things, the model allows admins to provision computing resources more quickly and adjust to changing needs.

To that end, Census recently installed a handful of blade servers in its Bowie, Md., data center to support the utility computing program and provide IT services to other bureau divisions.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Hardware, Management, IT Management



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