USPS makes a move to datacenter consolidation

With the clock ticking on meeting the deadlines that the Obama administration has placed on government agencies to reduce the number of federal datacenters, the USPS Office of Inspector General has announced that they signed a contract to consolidate four existing datacenters into one new energy efficient facility.

With the specter of the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative looming large, THE USPS OIG plans to move all of their IT operations into the new facility in the just 10 months. The primary contractor, Compu Dynamics, plans to make it a two stage migration in an attempt to not disrupt any of the IT operations of the OIG, who is supporting 90 existing offices with their current datacenter infrastructure.

Reducing the number of datacenters by 75% for every governmental agency would go a long way to meeting the goals of the FDCCI, but it is important to note that this datacenter consolation project is for a very small piece of the USPS IT infrastructure and has no impact on the computing backend used by the more than 30,000 post offices in the US.

With more than 1200 datacenters on the Federal budget, this consolidation project is just a tiny piece of the puzzle, and, literally a drop in the bucket when it comes to decreasing the more than 10 billion KWh used by the existing US governmental datacenter infrastructure, or even that used by the USPS. And one more thing to keep in mind; these savings in overall costs shouldn't impact the Federal budget. The USPS is supposed to be self-supporting from the sale of its own products and services, though it does get just under 100 million a year in revenue from the Federal government which is in payment for services offered for free to the blind and for certain governmental purposes