Defense Information Systems Agency officials say that consolidating data centers does not hinder the agency’s information technology support work for defense organizations, Federal News Radio reported Friday.
Jared Serbu writes the number of defense enterprise computing centers that DISA operates declined from 18 in 2008 to 10 as of May 2014.
“The enterprise services have continued to increase at a fairly significant rate, and we’re able to leverage the DECC infrastructure as a means to support that increased usage and demand without having to increase the number of facilities to support the population,” DISA Chief Information Officer David Bennett told the station.
DISA has no plans to close any of the remaining DECCs, but it continues to assess potential sites for its data center consolidation initiative, according to Serbu’s article.
Serbu reports that Alfred Rivera, DISA vice director for strategic planning, said the agency has realized that it could integrate military IT functions using only a handful of facilities.
“We wanted to change the way we ran our business, for example, we built functional expertise in certain areas and selected some centers to support specific mission partners,” Rivera told the station.
“That allowed us to look across the enterprise and see what we could reduce,” he added.
Bennett expects the Pentagon to designate all the existing DECCs as core data centers, which will work to facilitate application sharing across the department.
