Every US federal agency CIO has about five months to create a detailed plan of action to consolidate her or his agency's data centers to contain the agency's IT spending and increase energy efficiency of its IT infrastructure.

The deadline was issued on Feb. 26 by the office of Vivek Kundra, the first federal CIO in US history, whom President Barack Obama appointed in March 2009. In a memo addressed to all top federal information officers, Kundra laid out a number of deliverables and deadlines for the initial stage of implementation of a broad initiative to overhaul the government's entire IT infrastructure first announced in August 2009.

Goal of the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative is to slow the sprawl of government data center footprint and the resulting growth in energy consumption and cost. \"The reported number of federal data centers grew from 432 in 1998 to more than 1,100 in 2009,\" Kundra wrote in his memo, characterizing such infrastructure investment as \"costly, inefficient, unsustainable...\"

At the time of his initial announcement of the initiative last year, Kundra said the annual federal IT budget had grown by about $30 billion since the late '90s.

He also cited the US Environmental Agency's estimation that annual federal server and data center electricity consumption grew from about three billion kWh in 2000 to more than six billion kWh in 2006. If federal IT officers continued business as usual, that number may double by next year, he wrote in last week's memo.

Kundra designated Richard Spires and Michael Duffy, CIO's of the Department of Homeland Security and the Treasury Department, respectively, to lead the effort.

Under the top US government CIO's plan, agency CIO's have to submit initial asset inventories by the end of April, a draft data center consolidation plan by the end of June, a final asset inventory baseline by the end of July and a final data center consolidation plan by Aug. 30, 2010.

In his August 2009 announcement, Kundra said the effort would place a lot of emphasis on outsourcing government IT to public and private cloud providers and consolidating applications that cannot be outsourced through the use of virtualization.

One of the first cloud vendors to benefit from the initiative was Terremark, winning a contract to provide infrastructure that runs the newly revamped USA.gov.