West Virginia is part of a wave of states that are embracing data center and server consolidation in their government I.T. operations. It's replacing 85 e-mail servers that run a half-dozen different applications with four Exchange-based systems -- two for production, and two for backup.
And that's just for starters. Kyle Schfer, West Virginia's chief technology officer, wants to extend the consolidation initiative to the state's financial, procurement and human resources management systems. The savings on hardware alone justify the move, according to Schfer, who said that West Virginia currently replaces as many as 20 e-mail servers annually as part of its regular hardware refresh cycle.
Schafer knows that consolidation is old hat to many of his corporate IT counterparts. "Most Fortune 500 organizations run with less than a half-dozen e-mail servers," he said.
And he speaks from experience: Before becoming West Virginia's CTO two years ago, he was director of technology and design at electric and gas utility NiSource Inc.'s corporate services subsidiary in Columbus, Ohio.
Having spent years in the private sector, Schafer found state government IT to be entirely different. Individual agencies often have autonomous IT departments, and centralized management of technology remains a work in progress for most states. Schafer said that in West Virginia, he found servers "housed all over the place" -- even in switch rooms and wiring closets. In addition, there were no central data backup or security controls.
"It was somewhat of a shock to me to come into state government and see the level of autonomy that state agencies had over the technical infrastructure," Schafer said. But now, states "are moving in the same direction that private industry has already taken," he added. "We're just a couple of years behind that curve."
Of 29 state governments surveyed last spring by the National Association of State Chief Information...