Governor Gregoire's 'Shared Services Directive, February 10, 2009, directs the Department of Information Services to focus on using common infrastructure and services, including consolidation of e-mail services and expansion of the statewide data center, to reduce costs and improve information security and the collection of management information across state government.
The IT Work Group's project update report, February 10, 2009, cites contracted research that indicates that substantial opportunities exist for data center consolidation in Washington state government. For instance, the Olympia-area has 165 server facilities, averaging 27 servers each, and the remainder of the state has 486 server facilities, averaging 3 servers each. Expansion of a centralized data center can virtualize servers, enabling elimination of excess server capacities, consolidation of server administration and operations support functions.