IBM has won a 10-year, $267-million contract to modernize the State of Ohio Computing Center (SOCC) – a project that includes development of a private cloud-computing environment and deployment of other hardware, software and services.
Ohio’s cloud computing environment will be designed to provide a secure, high-performance and dependable foundation for computing, while costing the state less than its current infrastructure. The goal of the state’s IT consolidation is to substantially reduce its IT infrastructure services spend, and reallocate those funds to applications and services that support the citizens and businesses of Ohio.
“We are working with IBM to significantly reduce the complexity of our infrastructure, improve data center operations and increase service delivery for state agencies and the constituents they serve,” Stu Davis, State of Ohio’s Chief Information Officer said. “This is a foundational component of Ohio’s IT Optimization efforts that will result in savings and culminate in the consolidation of the state’s IT assets into a primary state data center. This provides agencies with services they require and ensures we are spending taxpayers’ dollars once.”
The SOCC includes four floors and more than 350,000 square feet of space. It houses infrastructure for several state agencies that support more than 1,600 applications executing on over 2,700 servers in a complex network environment via an annual $108 million budget for these resources.
Goals of the contract include:
- Remediating power and cooling capabilities in the state’s facility in Columbus
- Migrating agency related infrastructure and application workloads within the facility
- Implementing operating model improvements to deploy ITIL-based service management
- Ongoing services in a co-managed arrangement with state staff
CLO Inside Track: IBM’s cloud infrastructure deal with the state of Ohio illustrates the win-win cloud can deliver for public sector entities – particularly state and municipal governments – as well as for vendors. All government entities have one universal challenge now: they are charged with doing more with less. They must not only transition existing data center investments into more cost-efficient infrastructure (and that includes the high cost of power), but they also must move data out of silos and securely deliver an expanded array of internal and citizen-facing services. Despite hefty public-sector budget cuts, agencies sooner or later will have to embrace the reality that the cost of doing nothing – in both dollars spent and opportunities lost — is less than what they’re paying now.
(For more information contact: IBM Smarter Government http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/government/ideas/index.html).
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