The U.S. Army has recorded a 38 percent reduction in the number of enterprise data centers as the military branch works to achieve its goal of 10 data repositories by 2025.The service branch said Monday it has identified 1,157 data centers that are subject to closures as part of its plan to consolidate the facilities and has already closed 344 or 37 percent of 927 “non-tiered data centers.”
The Army’s office of the chief information officer/G-6 said in a Feb. 6 report that the service branch has shut down 41 percent or 94 out of 230 “tiered data centers,†a figure that exceeds the Office of Management and Budget’s reduction requirement of 25 percent.
Gary Wang, deputy CIO/G6, said the Army plans to operate four data centers at several military bases in Alabama, Kentucky, Colorado and North Carolina and run the other six facilities outside the continental U.S. by 2025.
The service branch has achieved at least $56 million in cost savings, decommissioned 2,848 servers and reduced floor space for such servers by approximately 154,000 feet through its data center consolidation effort, according to the report.
Wang said the Army also plans to reduce the number of its enterprise applications in areas such as engineering, human resources, logistics and finances through “application rationalization” and aims to run applications and other computing operations on commercial cloud services.
