US Government Shutting Down 40% Of Its Data Centres

Continuing with their spring (summer?) cleaning, the government has elected to shut down 800 of their vast collection of 2000 data centres across the country over the next four years. Officials expect the pruning to save us billions.

Currently, the US spends $US80 billion on information technology to run its numerous services and websites, making it the biggest buyer of IT in the world. But, in a bid to make the computing more efficient, many of these services will be consolidating and moving into the cloud. Sharing the computing load by performing tasks remotely and in tandem saves both processing power and money, saving $US5 billion a year. And closing down the data centres, apart from it being better on the environment, will save $US3 billion a year in energy costs.

And we’re already ahead of schedule, on track to close down 373 centres by 2012.

Again, this is part of a larger governmental effort to reduce spending that goes into redundant services. While the number of data centres in the country has ballooned over the last decade, officials are starting to agree that we simply don’t need that many, even when more services are pushed online in the future. Looks like progress to me. [NYT]