The ongoing data center consolidation initiative of the US federal government is increasing IT complexity in agency data centers, which may put expected scale and rate of budget savings in jeopardy, concluded a new report by MeriTalk, a group that facilitates networking among federal employees and conducts research in the area of federal IT.

MeriTalk concluded that the data center consolidation initiative is increasing complexity in federal data centers. About 60% of these facilities are running 20 or more operating systems and 48% of them are using 20 or more management applications.

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The government-wide consolidation initiative calls for more than 800 agency data centers to be closed by 2015. About 140 facilities have been identified for closure in 2011, some of which have already been closed. About 180 more have been put on the chopping block for 2012.

In a report it published in November 2010, MeriTalk estimated that the feds stood to save US$14.6bn a year from the consolidation initiative.

The new report, sponsored by the network vendor Juniper, is based on survey responses from more than 200 federal IT professionals.

Brian Roach, VP of federal sales at Juniper, said federal consolidation would "stall" when managing the complexity will cost as much as the savings realized through consolidation.

"Some data centers may already be approaching the threshold;16 percent of survey respondents run more than 100 operating systems and 20% do not know how many management applications they currently use," he said in a statement.

The survey showed that many federal IT workers expected their agencies' compute capacity needs to grow by 37% percent over the next five years. Many existing data centers are about 60% utilized, which means new and existing data centers will need to accommodate a 40% increase in demand.

The utilization rate reported by MeriTalk contrasts sharply with the rate reported by the outgoing White House CIO Vivek Kundra. In a recent report to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Kundra said CPU utilization in federal data centers was less than 27% and storage utilization was less than 40%.

To support the increased compute capacity, data center infrastructure will need to expand by 34%, according to MeriTalk.

While helping consolidate, extensive virtualization is creating new problems for the feds. About 70% of respondents said virtualization has led to increasing problems with latency and security services and policies.

According to survey responses, 38% of federal workloads were virtualized.