Portable Air Conditioning and Heating -- an Educational Blog

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During the debt-talk crisis, the federal government has released a map of 373 data centers that will be closed by 2012 -- that's 800,000 square feet of data center cooling that will be cut from the IT budget -- or about 14 football fields, as one official pointed out!  Maybe he was also thinking about the NFL players/owners negotiations!

Through these closings, the government expects to save $3 billion each year and be halfway to the goal of closing 800 of 2000 data centers by 2015.  And that's a good thing since the average utilization for these data centers is less than 27% for computing power and 40% for storage, states outgoing federal CIO Vivek Kundra.  That's a lot of wasted power and cooling!

What's closing of these data centers mean for federal employees?  Not a lot.  In many cases, these data centers are managed by contractors who will have to determine if these employees can be relocated or retrained.  As for the government employees, the goal is to "retool them for other jobs," said Kundra.

One thing for sure when there is all this government shake-up.... nothing goes as planned.  Spot cooler rentals for data center cooling will be in even greater demand until all this relocation and reorganization is settled.  After all, even the "cloud" needs to be cooled!