The US Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has closed down its Defense Enterprise Computing Center (DECC) in Huntsville, Alabama.

The US Department of Defense (DoD) – which DISA is a part of – said it expects to save US$3.2m each year from the closure of the Huntsville DECC.

In March DISA began its migration of DoD Enterprise Email (DEE) to other DECC’s.

Since 2008 the number of DISA DECC facilities in the US have fallen from 18 down to 10 with an estimated saving of $17m.

Former DoD CIO Teri Takai – who resigned from her position in May – said in her first blog post as CIO the department planned to close 44 of its data centers.

"DoD remains committed to identifying candidates for data center closure and consolidation in support of the secretary’s efficiency efforts and the IT reform plan goal of closing 800 federal data centers by 2015,” Takai said.

The closure of the Huntsville DECC is part of the Federal Data Center Consolidation effort which allows the agency to consolidate and converge existing IT infrastructure to gain fiscal and operational efficiencies across the board.

DISA and other military departments are aggressively consolidating data centers and IT infrastructure.

The consolidation is set to establish a core computing infrastructure that provides assured and access to “vital” enterprise services and aggregates computing services and infrastructure requirements to gain economic efficiencies of scale.

DISA said it also supports the adoption of the Joint Information Environment (JIE) – a DoD initiative to provide a consolidated, collaborative and secure JIE that enables end-to-end information sharing and interdependent enterprise services across the department.

The department said that through system analysis and standard DEE failover procedures, DISA validated its ability to maintain the highest level of service quality and support as the Huntsville DECC was decommissioned.