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Green Government

USPS merges data centres for energy efficiency

By Johanna Morden | 20 April 2011

The U.S. Postal Service – Office of Inspector General is to merge four of its data centres this month to save operating costs while increasing capacity and energy efficiency.

The U.S. Postal Service – Office of Inspector General (USPS OIG) will house its consolidated data centres in one new state-of-the-art facility.

The project will be completed in ten months. It will be done in two phases to prevent disruptions in current operations of the USPS OIG.

The project will have as its key elements the design and use of a new voice/data network, as well as the physical relocation of all USPS OIG IT assets into the new consolidated data centre.

The new data centre is designed for redundancy, reliability and a built-in intelligent maintainability.

It will feature energy-saving technologies, such as modular power systems and high density in-row cooling.

Inside the new data centre will be found a redundant N+1 air conditioning and uninterruptible powers systems (UPS) to ensure back-up emergency power to run the facility in case of a power outage. It will also contain a chilled water system that will employ ‘free cooling’ in the cooler months. It is expected to save thousands in electrical fees.

The project falls under the Federal Data Centre Consolidation Initiative launched last year by the Obama administration to reduce the government’s infrastructure costs and investments towards a target of US$3 billion in savings by 2015

The number of Federal data centres surged from 432 in 1998 to over 1,100 in 2009.

“This growth in redundant infrastructure investments is costly, inefficient and unsustainable and has a significant impact on energy consumption,” Vivek Kundra, Chief Information Officer of the United States of America, has said in the past.

“In 2006, Federal servers and data centers consumed six billion kwH of electricity, and without a fundamental shift in how we deploy technology it could reach 12 billion kwH by 2012,” he added.

Kundra reported relatively low utilisation rates of existing infrastructure and the limited reuse of data centres within or across agencies, coupled with significant operating costs involving hardware, software and cooling.

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