Failure to attain performance goals specified in the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) by a 2018 deadline could result in the forced closure of multiple government data processing centers. Condusiv CEO, Jim D’Arezzo, explains how government agencies are in a stronger position to allocate funds to software.

BURBANK, CA, JANUARY 3, 2018

According to a recent Government Accountability Office report, 22 of 24 federal agencies required to participate in the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Data Center Optimization Initiative reported that they had made only limited progress against OMB’s fiscal year 2018 performance targets. Only five of the 24 agencies, in fact, reported meeting or exceeding OMB’s five metric targets: server utilization and automated monitoring, energy metering, power usage effectiveness, facility utilization, and virtualization1.

Jim D’Arezzo, CEO of Condusiv Technologies, comments, “While this is undoubtedly disappointing to the authors and sponsors of the 2014 Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act-the goal of which was to reduce annual costs associated with federal data centers by the end of fiscal 2018-to the computer technology industry it comes as no great surprise.” D’Arezzo, whose company is the world leader in I/O reduction solutions for virtual and physical server environments, adds, “Government agency IT managers are, after all, struggling with the same issues that are causing problems for private-sector IT professionals around the world.”

In 2017, in fact, the third annual Condusiv Technologies Performance Survey of more than 1,400 IT professionals revealed that organizations, private and governmental alike, are struggling to get the full lifecycle from their backend storage as the growth of I/O continues to outpace expectations. Most alarming is that 27% of all organizations are currently getting user complaints related to sluggish performance from their MS-SQL applications. These organizations find themselves either living with these performance issues until the next budget cycle in which storage capital expenditures were planned, or pulling money from other IT initiatives to make large, unplanned server and/or storage purchases.2

The major cause of this imbalance between user demand and organizational capability, data scientists agree, is the recent explosive use of big data, which allows once unmanageable quantities and types of information to be analyzed and transformed into actionable insights, in conjunction with the Internet of Things, in which a whole range of technologies-autonomous vehicles, for example-is enabled by device-to-device communication and data sharing. While longer-range predications vary widely, there is broad agreement that the size of the digital universe will continue to double every two years, with a corresponding growth in demand for SQL-related computation.3

“In the government sector,” says D’Arezzo, “agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Homeland Security are aggressively expanding their big-data initiatives. At the same time, they are not merely encouraged, but mandated by FITARA to do more with less-or risk the loss of funding.” The FITARA legislation as it is written calls for an across-the-board 25% reduction in IT costs from these agencies by the end of FY 2018. He continued to explain that, one way data users can help themselves cope with these pressures is to lessen the need for additional capital spending by increasing the efficiency of the resources they already possess.

Condusiv is the world expert in this area, and has seen users of their software solutions more than double the I/O capability of storage and servers in their current configuration, whether real or virtual. Condusiv strongly encourages IT managers-especially those in government agencies under pressure to meet seemingly impossible FITARA requirements-to investigate what I/O optimization technology has to offer them.

About Condusiv Technologies
Condusiv® Technologies is the world leader in software-only storage performance solutions for virtual and physical server environments, enabling systems to process more data in less time for faster application performance. Condusiv guarantees to solve the toughest application performance challenges with faster-than-new performance via V-locity® for virtual servers or Diskeeper® for physical servers and PCs. With over 100 million licenses sold, Condusiv solutions are used by 90% of the Fortune 1000 and almost three-quarters of the Forbes Global 100 to increase business productivity and reduce data center costs while extending the life of existing hardware. Condusiv Chief Executive Officer Jim D’Arezzo has had a long and distinguished career in high technology.

Condusiv was founded in 1981 by Craig Jensen as Diskeeper Corporation. Jensen authored Diskeeper, which became the best-selling defragmentation software of all time. Over 33 years, he has taken the thought leadership in file system management and caching and transformed it into enterprise software.

For more information, visit condusiv.com

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1. “Data Center Optimization: Agencies Need to Address Challenges and Improve Progress to Achieve Cost Savings Goal,” U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-17-448, published August 15, 2017.

2. “Condusiv Releases Its 2017 I/O Performance Survey Results from over 1400 IT Professionals,” broadwayworld.com, August 16, 2017.

3. “The Exponential Growth of Data,” insideBIGDATA, February 16, 2017.