Reyer is thinking lean and green

The Oregon State Data Center provides IT infrastructure services to more than 250 Oregon agencies, boards, and commissions that serve more than 45,000 employees in addition to the millions of citizens using government services. Last December, Oregon's state government announced the successful completion of a $43 million, multiyear consolidation of 11 separate agency data centers into a single Tier 3 data center. The consolidation effort has shown significant savings in power consumption and puts the state well on its way toward reducing its carbon footprint. In addition, the infrastructure promotes widespread efficiencies in IT services for improved reliability and agility across all government entities.

The consolidation project provided many hard-earned lessons, and it wasn't easy. When I joined Oregon's IT team in 2005, the state had 11 separate, fragmented data centers that resulted in unnecessary expenses, excess redundancy, lower economies of scale, and poor efficiencies. Ad hoc IT budgets and investment prevented agencies from easily sharing IT infrastructure investments and support costs. The existing IT culture had no standardized architecture and no standards. There were expensive isolated systems, redundant functions, and architecture customized to hundreds of different applications.

Most of this infrastructure was nearing the end of its useful life, resulting in major risks to the state's business continuity and disaster recovery along with widespread security exposure. It was clear the existing infrastructure couldn't support any type of future needs. As I assessed the situation, I was surprised by the numerous single points of failure. These points weren't limited to the network, but existed throughout the infrastructure, which ran critical systems. Maintaining the status quo wasn't an option given these risks.