The US Social Security Administration (SSA) is to create a super sized IT infrastructure facility on which to consolidate its core data centers.

The new National Support Center (NSC) near Baltimore will house all the SSA’s storage, computing and bandwidth in a 300,000 square foot Tier 3 data center. Through virtualization the SSA aims to eliminate hundreds of physical servers and pursue twin objectives of flexibility and energy efficiency. Further costs, space and power efficiencies are being mooted through a storage consolidation.

Bringing it all together

Construction of the NSC finished three months early, according to Bill Zielinski, SSA CIO and deputy commissioner for systems. “We’ve made significant progress in the preparation for the migration of our mainframe and open systems,” said Zielinski.

In October 2014 the creation of a new virtual-tape library was completed which saw monthly energy consumption fall for the first time. November 2014 saw the start of installation of the networking and storage infrastructure and in March 2015 the migration of all production environments to the NSC will begin, a process Zielinski estimated will take 18 months.

Other energy efficient features include high density computing, convergent monitoring, hot aisle-containment, Energy Star equipment and solar power.

“We’ll monitor power utilization down to branch circuits, improving load management and control,” said Zielinski. Plans for power management include the use of LED lighting, a dedicated substation and new heating and cooling systems that could cut energy consumption by as much as 30 percent.

“We expect the NSC to save hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in energy costs,” said Zielinski. He admitted that a better understanding of power usage effectiveness (PUE) is needed at the facility. “Once the PUE is measured, we will use it as a baseline against our efficiency improvements at the NSC to make sure we meet our targets,” said Zielinski