Congress now pushing green tech on agencies with President

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Remember the Presidential order I pointed to a couple weeks ago that puts the executive branch on notice to start getting itself on the green bandwagon? It seems the Legislative branch wants some of that action too, starting with DHS. From a post at Enterprise IT Planet

…the Department of Homeland Security, which currently runs 24 data centers, plans to consolidate all of them into just 2 in the next four years. They will be called Data Center One and Data Center Two…Data Center One, currently being constructed at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi (again, where’s the cooling efficiency in Mississippi?), is facing a slightly embarrassing problem: not enough power. Congress therefore put a halt on money to build out the rest of the data center, and authorized $38 million to be spent on making sure the facility has enough green power before it progresses any further.

From a nextgov story on the halt

The fiscal 2010 Homeland Security appropriations bill requires the department to spend $38.5 million to upgrade the power capabilities at the National Center for Critical Information Processing and Storage, known as Data Center One and based at NASA’s Stennis Space Center, near the Gulf Coast in Mississippi. Homeland Security cannot spend the remaining $45 million on building out the data center, which will provide information processing for the entire department, until DHS officials can make certain the data center has enough power and uses green technologies to reduce demand.

If you are running one of the federal supercomputing centers and aren’t already halfway through your brief on how you are going to improve operating efficiency in the next 3 years by a factor of two, you are way behind.

Trackbacks

  1. […] not datacenters. We do know that the Congress is taking an interest in the data center plans of individual agencies, and you still have to worry about the Presidential Order. So I wouldn’t rest easy if I were […]