Only one of the 24 agencies participating in the US federal government's data center consolidation initiative managed to submit a complete inventory of its data centers to the Office of Management and Budget (OBM). None of the agencies submitted complete consolidation plans, according to a recent report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The OMB required agencies to submit inventories and consolidation plans by the end of September 2010. While all but one of them submitted the documents, nearly all of them missed key elements in their reports.

Without complete inventories and plans, GAO officials wrote, "agencies may not be able to implement their consolidation activities and realize expected cost savings. Moreover, without an understanding of the validity of agencies'consolidation data, OMB cannot be assured that agencies are providing a sound baseline for estimating consolidation savings and measuring progress against those goals."

Some agencies'inventories left out entire data centers, for example, and some failed to provide complete lists of software they used. OMB also did not require agencies to verify their inventory data, GAO wrote. Majority of the reports did not include a master schedule;half of them omitted cost-benefit calculations;and nine did not address risk management.

The OMB required agencies to submit data center inventories and consolidation plans by the end of August 2010. Multiple agency officials told GAO that the OMB's time lines were simply too tight.

Challenges in collecting the required information included difficulty in obtaining power usage data ÔÇô a challenge that was reported by 19 of the 24 agencies. Many agencies also reported that it was difficult to maintaining services as they made the transition to consolidated services.

The White House expects to realize substantial savings from the data center consolidation initiative federal CIO Vivek Kundra and OMB kicked off in February 2010. Federal IT professionals networking group MeriTalk estimated the savings to reach about US$14.6bn per year.

Kundra's plans call for more than 800 data centers to be closed by 2015. According to the inventories recently submitted by the agencies, the government currently operates more than 2,000 data centers.