Unplugging Data Centers

When state officials decided to merge Oregon's mish-mash of 12 agency data centers into one secure, cutting-edge facility in 2005, the task before them seemed easy enough. But three years and $63 million into the project, the state auditor was howling that Oregonians' private information was no more secure than before and agencies were complaining they were shelling out more in user fees than they'd spent to maintain their own facilities.

It's taken another three years for the consolidation project to start bearing fruit. Now Oregon is paying less per unit on all its major data center components than it did in 2007. The shared center is projecting total savings of about $200 million by 2013 over what agencies would have paid individually, Deputy Administrator Kurtis Danka and his boss, Administrator Julie Bozzi, told the state legislature in April.

As the federal government embarks on a massive program to consolidate its roughly 2,100 data centers down to 1,300 or fewer by 2015, federal officials from the Energy Department and elsewhere have come to Salem to tour Oregon's new facility and to learn from the state's experience, Danka says.