NYC Opens Consolidated Data Center

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New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg tour a new data center where the city will consolidate IT operations for multiple agencies (Photo Credit: Edward Reed).

New York City has opened a new data center in Brooklyn where the city will centralize the IT infrastructure for more than 40 city agencies over the next five years. The city invested $11.7 million in equipment to outfit the 18,000 square-foot facility, and will pay $2.7 million annually to lease the space at the MetroTech Center, but stands to save it more than $100 million over five years.

The consolidation effort, known as the Citywide IT Infrastructure Services (CITIServ) Program, is part of a broader effort called NYC Simplicity that aims to make the city's government more efficient, innovative and customer-focused.

"New York City is constantly employing new technology to improve and modernize services for New Yorkers, but until now the infrastructure behind that technology has been fragmented," said Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "By consolidating the IT operations of more than 40 city agencies, we'll modernize the city's technology infrastructure while saving taxpayers $100 million in the first five years alone. And by reducing the IT work done by individual city agencies, we'll enable them to concentrate more of their resources on what they really do best: teaching students, protecting our neighborhoods, cleaning our streets, preventing and putting out fires, and doing all the other things that improve our quality of life."

"Through NYC Simplicity, we're constantly looking for new ways to streamline operations, improve services and save scarce taxpayer dollars," said Deputy Mayor steven Goldsmith. "Consolidating the City's currently fragmented IT infrastructure into unified data centers is the latest example of how we're becoming a more efficient City government and achieving the goals of NYC Simplicity."

In its first days of operations, the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment' IT operations, the Department of Sanitation's IT Service Desk, and the Department of Education's "HR Connect" application have been moved into the centralized CITIServ environment. These systems alone support 140,000 users, and their consolidation will achieve a recurring annual savings of approximately $200,000.

In full, the CITIServ program offers:

In October 2010, as part of the Simplicity initiative, Bloomberg and Goldsmith joined Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to announce a wide-ranging information technology agreement to consolidate the City's dozens of individual license agreements into a single one and will provide more than 100,000 city employees with state-of-the-art computing power.