The Government Accountability Office has called on Congress to consider a possible extension to the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act‘s data center optimization and consolidation provisions in order to provide federal agencies more time to meet the Office of Management and Budget‘s performance targets and cost savings objective.GAO made the recommendation after it found that 22 out of 24 agencies mandated to take part in OMB’s Data Center Optimization Initiative reported minimal progress in meeting the agency’s five performance targets for fiscal 2018, the agency said in a report released Wednesday.
These targets include virtualization, server utilization and automated monitoring, energy metering, facility utilization and power usage effectiveness.
The report also showed that of the 22 agencies, 17 of them lacked plans to satisfy the OMB metrics by Sept. 30, 2018, which is a day before the FITARA provisions for data center consolidation expire on Oct. 1, 2018.
The congressional watchdog also found that 18 of the 24 DCOI-covered agencies had not fully deployed automated monitoring platforms to measure server utilization.
GAO urged those agencies to develop and submit plans to OMB to facilitate the implementation of such monitoring tools for data centers.
