James Riley
Wednesday, 09 September 2009 17:39
IT Policy -
Government Tech Policy
Page 1 of 2
Just one year after UK efficiency expert Sir Peter Gershon handed the Commonwealth his report on government ICT procurement and use, experts are already saying in the case of the data centre it might be time for another look.
Global tech services giant CSC says the fat pipes of the National
Broadband Network and the much matured market for virtualisation
software meant the savings anticipated by Gershon through data
consolidation measures may have been understated.
And the environmental and sustainability improvements delivered by
combination of the NBN and virtualisation technologies should give
government good reason to take another look at medium-term data centre
plans, according to CSC Australia chief innovation and technology
officer Bob Hayward.
As the bandwidth of the NBN becomes a reality, the broadband network
will start to accelerate the shift to cloud model, and the Commonwealth
should think now about Government Cloud models, he said.
Power consumption issues are non-trivial. Hayward says data centres
around the world consume more energy than Argentina, and doubles every
5 – 7 years. And 6 to 8 per cent of Australia’s greenhouse gas
emissions are directly attributable to ICT use.
Consolidated data centres and virtualised environments, coupled with
the ability to shift processing loads and data more easily across the
NBN, created opportunity for government to pursue cloud models.
"Gershon (conducted the review) really just before Cloud took hold,"
Hayward told iTWire. "It talked a lot about consolidated data centres
and virtualisation, but how you then move beyond virtualisation into
these flexible, self-provisioning, really agile computing environments
with pay-as-you-go models – that is something I don’t think was quite
there when (Sir Peter) did his reviews in the UK and in Australia."
"These are things you need to look at the medium term … certainly it
needs to be on the planning horizon," he said. "If organisations in
Government are looking at consolidating their data centres in 12 to 18
months then why not do that with some view to private government
cloud-type infrastructure."
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