The US White House has placed much focus on cloud computing but few agencies have moved toward adoption of the model, with most still nervously wriggling their toes above the cloud-computing waters.

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra encourages government agencies to use cloud-based technologies as much as possible. Key to this emphasis is the government’s push to consolidate data center infrastructure, which has sprawled out of control, creating massive expenses that Kundra thinks can be reduced by consolidation and outsourcing into cloud.

Tom Hempfield, VP of HP’s Federal Business organization, said that while a number of agencies had instituted cloud solutions, there were currently no full-scale deployments. He said he would be surprised if even 25% of federal IT departments used any technology that could be referred to as cloud computing. The biggest obstacle to its adoption by any public agency is the difficulty in defining governance over IT assets and data, he said.

FEDERAL CLOUD CHAMPIONS

Agencies already using some form of cloud computing include the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which has signed a contract with Salesforce.com to put health records into the provider’s cloud. The Department of the Interior is moving email into the cloud and the Department of Defense (DoD) is also looking to consolidate and centralize infrastructure serving military personnel’s email. Agencies ahead of others in their use of the cloud by actively exploring the Infrastructure-as-a-Service model are in the science, defense and intelligence sectors

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is building Nebula, a private cloud that will provide Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a- Service (IaaS) to NASA’s administrative offices and researchers.

The Department of Energy is developing Magellan, a private cloud that will provide compute resources to researchers working in the department’s labs across the country. Magellan is being deployed at the department’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois in an attempt to discover whether cloud computing can provide the large computational power required for scientific research.

DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY IN EXPLORATORY MODE

Like HHS, Defense and Interior departments, DoE has made efforts to explore opportunities for cloud-computing deployments for administrative loads, such as email, currently handled at its two large data centers and a multitude of small ones, but no actual deployments have been made so far, the department’s Acting CIO William Turnbull said. This infrastructure excludes the scientific data centers at national laboratories.

DoE has done some consolidation by virtualizing some of its infrastructure. Currently, 250 virtualized servers running Windows environments are deployed on 14 physical servers at the two data centers. Some Solaris and Linux environments have been virtualized but to a much smaller extent. “We’ve made a lot of progress so far with virtualization and we’re continuing to push that,” Turnbull said.

In addition to direct savings achieved by avoiding the purchase of extra physical servers, the department estimated it had saved 1.5m kWh per year as result of virtualization. To what extent the department will integrate cloud computing into its overall IT infrastructure remains open. A working group is studying the matter but Turnbull does not expect to have results for several months.

DEFENSE AND INTELLIGENCE MOST AGGRESSIVE ADOPTERS

Intelligence and defense are sectors of the US government that place the largest emphasis on cloud computing, according to Dave Ryan, HP’s alliance manager for General Dynamics (GD) – a large federal-government vendor. HP and GD work on federal IT contracts together, including IaaS deployments. One such collaboration is a cloud solution for the Marine Corps. The Marines’ private cloud is currently deployed in the initial-operational-capability phase and Ryan expects to start migrating applications onto the infrastructure over the spring-summer period. The Marine Corps Enterprise IT Services system was designed and will be managed by GD, which won the “indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity” contract – valued at $95m over five years – in 2008. The system will provide “application hosting capabilities, enterprise shared services, access to enterprise-wide information, collaboration and information sharing across business and war fighter domains”, according to the GD web site.

Another IaaS contract HP is working on is called RACE, the Defense Department’s cloud platform and infrastructure service for test and production environments. RACE is a community cloud, an infrastructure shared by agencies throughout the US defense community, deployed in a DoD data center and managed by HP employees. The defense and intelligence sectors show more interest in cloud because of new capabilities it may provide to solve some of their substantial data problems, Ryan said. However it will be some time before deployment of cloud computing models by the US government is seen on a large scale.