Consolidating data centers has benefits beyond being green.
As reported in Network World, the State of Oregon announced its plan to integrate their 11 separate state agency data centers. Costing some $43 million and taking four years (due to complete in 2009, since it started in 2005), the project ought to reduce energy consumption through virtualization and lower cooling requirements.
The project will also improve security, since a consolidated data center is more likely to be able to enforce modern security policies and can afford a security staff and justify high density security technologies like deep packet inspection typical in Inspection Prevention Systems that may not be justified in smaller data centers.
